Home > Supply Chain Management Software > Ariba > Ariba vs IBM Sterling

Ariba vs IBM Sterling

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Our analysts compared Ariba vs IBM Sterling based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Supply Chain Management Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Overview Pricing Benefits & Features User Ratings Analyst Summary Screenshots
Ariba Software Tool
IBM Sterling Software Tool
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Product Basics

SAP Ariba is a cloud-based solution built to handle the end-to-end spend life cycle for businesses of all sizes. It also supports sourcing, procurement and numerous supply and distribution processes. It is scalable and comes with subscription or on-demand pricing options.

It integrates with ERP and other back-office options so that users can hang onto preferred workflows. With a focus on collaboration with suppliers and trading partners, users can extend their influence and discover valuable networking opportunities.
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IBM Sterling is an open, integrated platform that leverages advanced technologies like AI and blockchain to connect with the supplier ecosystem. It provides real-time insights, end-to-end visibility and recommended measures to transform interruptions into customer engagement, profit and growth opportunities.

It offers support for supplier, inventory and order management. Users can build smarter business networks using business process improvement, supply chain visibility, supplier collaboration, manufacturing solutions, order fulfillment and retail solutions. It also supports B2B collaboration to fulfill ongoing business demands, minimize complexity and reduce costs.
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Product Insights

  • Manage Supply Chain Disruptions: Robust analytics and real-time communications with suppliers enables responses to supply chain disruptions in advance and as they occur. Avoid costly problem resolution by tackling issues before they have a damaging impact. 
  • Reduce Costs: Cut costs and boost control over processes with accessible contract and procurement management tools. Remove costly mistakes from the equation and leverage sustained sourcing savings, resulting in increased profits. 
  • End-to-End Features: Support the entire sourcing process with robust features that strengthen sourcing, procurement, financial and supply chain management tasks. 
  • Boost Collaboration: Leverage a digital marketplace to help grow and manage sales cycles. Buyers can post sourcing through SAP Ariba Discovery and suppliers can respond with their details. Lets users join Ariba Network, which has a double the volume compared to eBay and Amazon combined. 
  • Improved Risk Reduction: Ensure suppliers go through rigorous onboarding and qualification measurements to guarantee them as a good fit. Includes performance management features that offer valuable insight into client’s partner performance. 
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  • Evolve Business Processes: Maintain business continuity, reduce operational silos, respond to market disruptions and mitigate risks with intelligent workflows. Improve interactions between people, data and processes through its experts and reduce inventory costs with process improvements. 
  • Improve Visibility: Supply chain stakeholders can access data related to inventory, order processes, delivery and potential disruptions. Improves customer service, assists with regulatory directives and mitigates interruptions affecting supplier inventory levels and product delivery with advanced insights. 
  • Supplier Collaboration: Streamline collaboration to drive efficiencies, increase supplier satisfaction, resolve disruptions for procure-to-pay transactions and order-to-cash with supplier collaboration solutions and global business networks. Quickly respond to supplier issues with embedded AI capabilities like cycle time prediction, anomaly detection and next-best-action recommendations. 
  • Deliver Customer Promises: Track orders from inception to delivery, manage data and processes and gain visibility into all orders throughout channels. Offers various solutions that include order management, order fulfillment, inventory management and digital store operations. 
  • Enhance Manufacturing Management: Innovate supply chain management by transforming outdated processes, uncovering hidden insights and delivering superior customer experience with automation, IoT, AI and blockchain. It helps avoid disruptions, improve visibility, respond quickly and streamline planning and optimization. 
  • Retail Technology Services: Evolve the shopping experience with advanced retail solutions for fulfilling digital demands. Revitalize customer engagement by delivering omnichannel marketing messages and offers tailored to the customer base. Minimize disruptions to the supply chain through various retail technology solutions. 
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  • Buying and Invoicing: A configurable interface with built-in approvals keeps up-to-date with compliance and cataloging. Removes the difficulty in the procure-to-pay process by simplifying the management of each step and supports businesses agility and scalability through global spend and visibility tools. 
  • Financial Supply Chain Management: Streamline operations by eliminating manual entry and applying automation to complex processes. Link purchase orders to invoices, improve metric capture, comply with tax regulations, capture payment discounts and more. 
  • Strategic Sourcing: Integrates into procurement execution processes for increased visibility, more savings opportunities and spend segmentation. Enables teams to organize and standardize their source-to-contract tasks, as it aggregates purchase orders with proper classification. 
  • Direct Spending: Integrates with all processes from product design to manufacturing and delivery, which helps: 
    •  Speeds up the time to market and provides a head start on the competition. 
    •  Boosts supplier collaboration by identifying product shortages before they become costly problems. 
    •  Increases supply chain visibility to increase fill rates and reduce overall inventory levels. 
  • E-Procurement: Helps reduce bottom-line costs by delivering optimal negotiated savings rates. Decreases buying cycles by up to 50%, lowers supply costs by 10% and reduces processing costs by up to 60%. 
  • Intelligent Spend: Users can simultaneously handle spend by category as well as coordinate spend policies for supply chain operations with a fully unified view of all spend processes. Supports all critical spend categories, including direct and indirect materials, external labor, travel and other expenses. 
  • Buyer Services: Robust deployment services, solution consultations and adoption support enables a quick deployment and ensures that requirements are met right out of the gate. 
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  • Business Network: Offers cloud-based and security-rich connectivity with suppliers, partners and customers. Ensure timely order deliveries with real-time intelligence and recommendations through AI capabilities. Provides multi-party visibility of digital events throughout the supply chain via blockchain, empowering transparency and trust. 
  • Food Trust: Connects participants through an immutable, permissioned and shared record of processing details, food provenance, transaction data and more through its collaborative network. Trace the location and status of food products, including essential details like multi-ingredient and farm-store view. 
  • Visibility Insights: Optimize performance by correlating data from disparate and siloed systems, creating digital playbooks and capturing organizational knowledge. Accelerate time to value, get intelligent insights, manage inventory and mitigate disruptions to meet demand through the inventory control tower. Supply chain intelligence services help boost data integration by developing purpose-built control towers using a control tower solution blueprint. 
  • TradeLens Platform: Gain access to a supply chain and logistics network with over half of the global container shipping volume data coverage through an interconnected supply chain partners system. Every shipment party can access their information and all transactions’ audit trails using its permission matrix. Offers services and apps developed by TradeLens and third parties to accelerate innovation and value creation. 
  • Trust Your Supplier: Identify, onboard and manage qualified suppliers through a blockchain-based solution. It helps expedite supplier onboarding, lower procurement operating costs, reduce compliance risk, speed new supplier assessments, access verified data and streamline insight sharing. 
  • Business Transaction Intelligence: Provides insights into B2B transaction lifecycles. Offers multi-part shared transaction visibility and empowers users with real-time visibility and self-service. Prevents potential risks by giving discrepancy alerts on B2B transaction anomalies. 
  • Transaction Manager: Automates manual B2B transactions and helps save money and time by cutting costs, reducing errors and elevating user satisfaction with customers, non-EDI suppliers and other trading partners. Gain unified visibility throughout supply chain partner transactions and onboard non-technical trading partners. 
  • Document Conversion Services: Converts manual transactions and non-structured documents like email, pdf and fax into EDI or other structured formats. Provides various features, including advanced OCR to read images, customized exception handling, multiple language support and ICR technology to recognize handwriting. 
  • Order Management: Ensures omnichannel order fulfillment by combining inventory and delivery visibility, multichannel order aggregation and service availability in a single platform. It helps customize monitoring and alerts, take immediate actions on capacity, deliver order promises with intelligent fulfillment and use reverse logistics to track inventory. 
  • Fulfillment Optimizer with Watson: Enhance existing order management systems and minimize cost-to-serve with cognitive analytics engine. Retailers can utilize store capacity, balance protecting margins and meet delivery expectations, increasing profits. 
  • Inventory Visibility: Explore product highlights and find use-case specific solutions. Users can personalize dashboards, balance inventory across channels, track inventory velocity, enable drop shipping, leverage autoscaling, get real-time views with the Cassandra database, Akamai gateways and more. 
  • Store Engagement: Gain inventory, customer and order data view through an intuitive user-interface, accessible from mobile devices and sales counters. Provides cross-sell and up-sell recommendations, enables flexible fulfillment options, helps standardize processes for task and inventory management and manages returns throughout channels using purpose-built tools. 
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Product Ranking

#39

among all
Supply Chain Management Software

#19

among all
Supply Chain Management Software

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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 1222 reviews
Great User Sentiment 47 reviews
83%
of users recommend this product

Ariba has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 83% when considering 1222 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

84%
of users recommend this product

IBM Sterling has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 84% when considering 47 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

4.9 (14)
n/a
4.1 (451)
4.1 (38)
3.5 (48)
5.0 (1)
n/a
4.6 (5)
4.3 (355)
4.5 (2)
4.1 (354)
4.0 (1)

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Regular Feature Updates: New features are regularly introduced in the software, which is an advantage according to all reviews on this aspect.
Easy to Use: More than 90% of reviews on this feature suggest that the software has an intuitive user interface and all features are easy to navigate.
ERP Synchronization: It’s easy to integrate with an ERP system, a chief benefit as all reviews on the topic indicate.
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Integration: It supports integration with multiple external systems, as noted by 88% of reviewers who mention integration.
Customization: It offers highly customizable tools and features, as observed by 50% of the users who refer to reports.
Ease of Use: It offers a flexible platform that is easy to use, manage and modify, as noted by all the reviewers specifying ease of use.
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Data Emailing: According to 80% of reviews on email capabilities, sending generated data via emails is slow and cumbersome.
Learning Curve: It has a learning curve for new users, as all reviews on this aspect state.
Lags Sometimes: According to all reviews on speed, the website lags occasionally while opening windows or clicking on drop down menus.
Customer Support: User support is quite slow especially for light account users, according to all reviews on customer support.
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Learning Curve: It is complicated to understand and involves a steep learning curve, as stated by 57% of the users who report learning curve.
Interface: Over 50% of reviewers that mentioned the interface stated that the interface is not user-friendly and intuitive.
Resource-Intensive: It consumes a large amount of system resources, as observed by all reviewers referring to system resource utilization.
Implementation: Around 67% of the users who specified implementation report that the deployment and implementation process is cumbersome.
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SAP Ariba is a comprehensive tool designed to help organizations with procurement, sourcing and supply chain management. User reviews suggest that data emailing and a steep learning curve are a couple major drawbacks of the product. The customer support is slow for light account users as well. Another con is that lags occur during basic navigation tasks. However, consistent product updates help solve such hindrances and consistently add new capabilities. It’s easy to use and can be easily synced with an ERP solution, which many users cite as a great advantage. All in all, it provides strong benefits but has some drawbacks that may make other solutions a better choice.

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IBM Sterling is a flexible and easy-to-use supply chain suite that helps its customers build dynamic and smarter business networks. It has a highly customizable platform and supports comprehensive integration capabilities with various external systems. Many reviewers have noted that it does not have an intuitive user interface, and the implementation process can be cumbersome. It involves a steep learning curve, and users find it complicated to understand. It also consumes a large amount of system resources, making it slow sometimes.

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Screenshots

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Head-to-Head Comparison

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