Overview of SAP Ariba Catalog Types

Adeoye Oyekan

10/19/20243 min read

a row of red shopping carts sitting in front of a store

Catalogs serve as the main channel through which suppliers communicate product offerings and pricing details to their customers. Suppliers distribute catalogs through SAP Business Network, email, or FTP.

In SAP Ariba Buying, catalogs are essential for streamlining the procurement process, providing requesters with pre-approved goods and services, and making procurement easier. There are different types of catalogs in SAP Ariba based on the method of accessing and maintaining them. Here's an overview of the key Ariba catalog types:

1. Static Catalogs: These are traditional catalogs that are uploaded into the SAP Ariba Buying solutions as a single text file. Usually supported files are in Catalog Interchange Format (CIF), commerce eXtensible Markup Language (cXML), Excel and BMEcat formats. Static Catalogs are maintained manually either by the supplier or the buyer. Static Catalogs are best for smaller suppliers or when the product offerings don’t change frequently. They require manual updates whenever there are changes in the product or pricing information.

Static Catalogs can contain a number of different item types as follows:

❖ Partial Items: Partial items are typically catalog items where the requester needs to provide or select additional information such as prices, description etc. before placing the order.

❖ Parametric Items: These are catalog items that require the requesters to define or choose further parameters such as size, colour etc. before placing an order for such items.

❖ Mandatory Items: Mandatory items are catalog items that must be ordered together with a main item. For example, if a laptop and its power adapter are listed as separate items in the customer catalog, the power adapter might be a mandatory item for the laptop.

2. PunchOut Catalogs: A PunchOut catalog allows buyers to access a supplier’s web-based catalog from the SAP Ariba Buying solutions and "punch out" to the supplier’s site to select items. Once the selection is done, the shopping cart is transferred back to Ariba for order processing. PunchOut Catalogs are useful for suppliers with large, dynamic product offerings or where real-time inventory and pricing are important. As PunchOut Catalogs are hosted on the supplier's website, the buyer does not need to maintain the catalog in Ariba. The supplier manages everything on their site. For PunchOut customer catalogs, procurement applications display a button/link - Buy from Supplier instead of product or pricing details. PunchOut Catalogs are categorised as follows based on the catalog configuration.

❖ Level 1 (Store-Level) PunchOut Catalogs: The requester punches out to the supplier’s website to search for items they want to buy. Usually, PunchOut Level 1 Catalogs are displayed as a single catalog item in the SAP Ariba/Guided Buying.

❖ Level 2 (Item-Level) PunchOut Catalogs: The requester searches for items from the local catalogs within the SAP Ariba Buying solutions and then punches out to the supplier’s website to add the item to his shopping cart.

3. Spot Buy Catalogs: Spot Buy is a feature that helps requesters search for and buy non-sourced goods from the SAP Ariba/Guided Buying, those goods that have not been previously put under contract. The products that requesters can choose from are provided by trusted, vetted suppliers on SAP Business Network and pre-enabled B2B marketplaces thus offering on-demand catalogs of approximately 200 million items. Common Ariba Spot Buy marketplaces are Amazon Business and Mercateo (Unite) among others. Requesters must belong to the Spot Buy User group to see the search results for Spot Buy catalog items.

In conclusion, each catalog type has its specific use cases, and organizations may use one or a combination of these catalog types based on their procurement needs and the nature of their suppliers. During the implementation of SAP Ariba Buying, organisations need to define, based on their supplier base, which type of catalogs are possible and of importance to their procurement strategy.