With advanced tools to automate manual processes and support close collaboration with suppliers, SAP Ariba helps streamline source-to-pay processes across organizations.
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Tungsten TotalAgility
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Tungsten TotalAgility brings cognitive capture capabilities to the hands of business analysts and non-technical users to solve content-centric challenges, including classification and extraction from financial documents, contracts, forms and other information-intensive documents.
SAP Ariba is pivotal for our organization's supply chain requirements. The purchasing department needs it for vendor purchase order issuance and vendor order management. We can check procurement history for the last purchased price, standard price, price breaks, lead time for products, vendor, and alternate vendor details.
Less appropriate would be where the customer is mainly concerned in how fast they can get the work done due to the performance issues in Kofax TotalAgility. The customer needs to weigh the overall elimination of functions that were done manually and how long it takes them to do these functions. They have to consider the overall time, not just the act of launching the form and completing it. Many manual functions should be replaced with the automation in the workflow.
Complete Procurement of Inventory step easy through GUI-Ariba integration once Purchase order is created and it is sent to the SAP Ariba Supplier Network. Vendor confirms the order and sends notification of Inbound Delivery to the warehouse through ASN and the Inbound process, Goods Receipt Process, Unloading, Put away process easy.
SAP Ariba integrates the different SAP Sourcing platforms, services and their tools in order to optimize operations, saves cost and meeting customer requirements through its easy to use tools. Such as integration with SAP S/4 HANA, SAP EWM using Idocs for End to End sourcing and Procurement coverage.
As a part of the SAP Direct Sourcing suite, it helps allow customer manage their direct materials in the single dashboard and helping customer to have view of the comprehensive info about BoM and the structure. Based on requirements, buyers can run materials and/or entire Bill of Materials. When these are sent from ERP to SAP Ariba, managers can manage them in the direct spend dashboard. Can search for desired items in the dashboard and view details of BoM or deeper view of information of the material. Buyers can run sourcing, run details for materials, create material quotes, and create pricing using book quotes.
Ease of use. The drag and drop configuration to create the processes makes the product easy to use and configure. Most of the icons are intuitive on what they are and how to use them. The use of the colored icons for each value also helps to know that that value is looking for.
Forms. The capture forms are easy to create and maintain. A new field can be added to the Extraction group and then the capture form is regenerated and that field is automatically added to the form with all the proper attributes. If an additional check box or field is added to the form, that field stays when regenerated. This differs from KTA 6.0.
Kofax has done pretty well integrating all the pieces of Kofax into one product. KC (Kofax Capture), KIC (Kofax Import Connector), KTM (Kofax Transformation Module with OCR), and workflow are all combined into KTA (Kofax Total Agility). This lets all of these features work together in one product. Kofax does keep adding more to the functions that maybe were left out original version. This makes Kofax Total Agility a robust product.
Integration with other tools is not very good. The APIs provided are not scheduled within the Ariba process and must use a middleware to send information back and forth between tools
Customer support for configuration questions. The response time can be weeks or months waiting time and the response back is often unhelpful.
Flexibility with company entities. With a large company with so many entities it is hard to structure and customize your suppliers into many entities. You often have to duplicate.
Exception management within the platform can certainly be improved upon. If a job is suspended for any particular issue integrations can be put in place to attempt to handle them but it is kludgy and does not always work as anticipated.
The administration interface is based on Microsoft Silverlight which limits it to certain versions of Internet Explorer and the interface has seen better days. Their other application, Kofax Kapow, has a much more mature and intuitive interface. This supposedly is being replaced in the next major iteration but I have doubts it will be successfully done.
The product is expensive. It is also the Cadillac of workflow platforms with document transformation built in. In many cases the product can do what you want it to do but there may be other more cost effective platforms.
While its great at usability. I would love ut have it more simplified. I would like to advocate for some personas who are non tech savvy or who have less or no experience in procurement. I sometimes feel that the valley of user learning fir such personas is quite steep and it may take them long time of learning to get adept to the platform.
Customer support has always been top notch. From small configuration changes to overall process changes, support has the teammates in place with excellent knowledge and is able to provide solutions based on business challenges quickly. Their customer support through their Account teams continues to be hands on and very responsive to needs in a timely fashion.
It's important to note that user experiences may vary, and the perceived areas for improvement depend on the specific needs and expectations of each organization. Frequent updates and feedback from users often guide software developers in addressing these areas to enhance the overall user satisfaction with the platform
Kofax TotalAgility is a beast of a package that gives you a thousand ways to tackle a problem, but it may not be the best platform for your needs. It is more of an enterprise platform that integrates well with other systems with moderate development time. Other packages may be cheaper, easier, and faster to implement depending on needs.
We saved nearly 10% of planned costs due to the large database of vendors we created within the company as a whole.
Saving in time due to shortening of procurement cycles. Procurement activities were never on the critical path and were accomplished with less Supply Chain resources than originally planned.
In the process we created a huge database of Vendors and Pricing which well be beneficial in our future projects.
It is an excellent tool and just what are business required and could afford.
The product is a behemoth to stand up and is cost prohibitive well before it can be implemented. Long term vision planning must be done to realize a positive ROI.
It is costly to locate or train internal resources to implement the product successfully. It is very easy to be lost in a black hole if trying to implement it with no previous experience of an ECM platform.
Demonstrating the platform to key stakeholders from multiple departments will most likely lead to discussions where business processes can be automated allowing for a faster ROI.
