SAP has announced it has been named a leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Procure-to-Pay suites, and also for the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Configure, Price and Quote application Suites.
The company has also been named a market leader in other areas of the IT industry over the last four months, including the Gartner Magic Quadrants for; Data Quality solutions, Digital Commerce, Data Integration Tools, Sales Force Automation (for SAP Sales Cloud), and Personalisation Engines (for Emarsys).
In this article IgniteSAP will take a look at the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrants for Procure-to-Pay (P2P) suites and Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) application Suites.
In the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Procure-to-Pay suites report Gartner assessed twelve P2P suite providers and named SAP a Leader for its “Ability to Execute” and “Completeness of Vision”.
This is the sixth time that the evaluation of the SAP Ariba and SAP Fieldglass packages have led Gartner to name them market leaders.
Gartner describes the P2P suite market as “integrated solutions with automated workflows to request, procure, receive and pay for goods and services across an enterprise. These solutions are marketed as suitable for processing, at a basic level, all types of spending including indirect goods, direct goods and services. P2P suites optimise the purchasing process, resulting in improved financial controls, process compliance, cost savings (or cost avoidance) and mitigated risk.”
Speaking for SAP, their chief marketing and solutions officer of Intelligent Spend and Business Network, Etosha Thurman said: “The tumultuous past few years have highlighted just how important procurement is to business health and resilience. Gaining real-time visibility into all aspects of the supply chain: from trading partners’ inventory and capacity to enterprise-wide spend has proven crucial. With SAP solutions, our customers gain a holistic, unified view of all types of spend. We believe our Leader position in this report underscores our best-in-class solutions and continued innovation, particularly our improved buying experience and unmatched network vision.”
SAP solutions utilise digital networks to create source-to-pay process efficiencies to improve procurement performance and drive business value. The Ariba Network is now part of SAP Business Network along with SAP Logistics Business Network and SAP Asset Intelligence Network. This unified network allows greater agility, visibility and collaboration between organisations and partners.
The report by Gartner points out that SAP has indicated they are investing to develop: “centralised invoice management, deploying a new search engine integration in guided buying, integration with collaboration platforms, and AI-based capabilities such as intelligent approval based on user behaviour.”
Gartner also points out the strengths that give Ariba and Fieldglass an advantage over other solution providers in this area. They are: the ability to procure temporary labour with Fieldglass, deep integration with S/4HANA (which allows synchronisation of supplier master data and automatic generation of replenishment orders), and global coverage.
Gartner also approves of SAP working towards supporting legislative frameworks in each geographical area, keeping up with changes in new tax models, clearance models, and offering support for localised tax and invoice regulations.
The next report we are looking at is the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Configure, Price and Quote application Suites which also recognised SAP as a market leader, and for the fourth year in a row.
Configure, Price and Quote application suites enable sales organisations to automate and optimise the creation of quotes and capture of orders. The SAP CPQ solution is designed to streamline the process, leading to more signed deals, maximum revenue and a better experience for both sales and customers.
Gartner recognised SAP’s leader status for three distinguishing characteristics of their CPQ applications suite: global reach, as an omni-channel product, and for their growing presence in the market. Gartner said that the strength of SAP’s CPQ lies in their support for direct sales, channel sales and self-service sales, and the ability to switch between channels easily.
The functionality of SAP CPQ provides the ability to present a diverse sales catalogue with a powerful search engine, comprehensive product comparison and: “rapid order entry, eligibility checking saved favourite configurations, pre-pick pricing and guided product recommendations that can be driven by attribute filtering rules or its own machine learning algorithms.”
Gartner was also impressed by the integration of SAP CPQ with other SAP products like S/4HANA, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Subscription Billing, and SAP 3D Visual Enterprise for visualising the entire business operation.
Gartner have a reputation for providing a useful overview of many areas of industry for those looking to purchase IT solutions and it is generally accepted that the magic quadrant is a useful way of representing a lot of information in a cohesive way that is easy to interpret.
Because it is often a first stop on the way to assessing potential IT purchases for many companies, it is quite significant that they have such a high opinion of SAP, as this makes it easier for professionals who need to make a business case for SAP implementations and improvements. Also, the quadrant affectively acts as a market signpost that independently drives potential customers toward SAP, and is one among many indicators of SAP’s performance as a corporation.
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Whether the report is based on an empirically verifiable process is not really the point. It is the comparison of features and functions in competing software solutions that is important, and in this respect SAP compares favourably. So for SAP to consistently achieve leader status in the Gartner Magic Quadrants is a meaningful accolade and IT professionals would do well to take note, even if the primary audience of the report is those purchasing rather than implementing IT solutions.
If you are an IT professional looking to make the most of your skills in SAP get in touch with IgniteSAP and we can take you through your career opportunities in the ever-expanding SAP implementation market.
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