Conquer your challenges and achieve your goals with SAP
The myriad challenges you face today in the chemicals industry – from resource scarcity, margin erosion, and commodity competition to evolving customer preferences and environmental responsibility – can be tackled more efficiently and effectively with SAP procurement and supply chain solutions. This includes organizational aspirations to develop new business models, products, and services to adopt a circular economy and optimize operations at scale.
We can help you bring more spend under management to control and reduce costs. Digitalize and automate processes to improve efficiency and resource allocation. Manage supplier performance and risk to respond with greater agility to supply and operational disruption. And collaborate with suppliers more effectively to optimize inventory while stimulating innovation. Working with SAP, you can:
- Find suppliers that support strategic expectations with reduced risk
- Facilitate contract negotiations for improved pricing and service levels
- Fulfill the needs of complex and volatile supply chains
- Return to operations after shutdowns, turnarounds, and outages with minimal downtime or additional cost
- Comply with mandates for lower carbon footprints, green packaging, and sustainable production
The SAP Advantage
Integrated supply chain collaboration
Respond intelligently to changes in supply and demand with real-time visibility into supply chain metrics. Achieve sustainability goals and collaborate with trading partners to improve visibility into supply with capabilities integrated with your ERP and supply chain optimization systems.
Simpler supplier management
Manage the supplier lifecycle using comprehensive tools integrated with your sourcing process. Quickly and easily contract with, onboard, qualify, and segment multiple tiers of suppliers to better manage supplier certification validation while monitoring performance, compliance, safety, and risk.
Innovative supplier experience management
Survey, analyze, and act upon supplier issues more purposefully with Qualtrics XM for Suppliers. Gather data that can reveal supplier views about, for example, responding to RFPs, early-payment discounts, or ability to meet scheduled deliveries.
Dynamic discounting
Transform payables into strategic assets to better manage cash and working capital, by collaborating on automated, early-payment discounts with suppliers over Ariba Network.
Guided buying
Give employees a simple way to buy – one they’re happy to use and that guides them to preferred suppliers while they adhere to processes and policies – with this built-in capability of SAP Ariba procurement solutions.
Complete supply chain visibility
Gain full visibility into inventory across your supply network, including buyer-owned, consigned, and supplier-managed stock. With network-generated intelligence, you can optimize inventory levels, react swiftly to changes in demand, and improve on-time customer delivery rates.
Optimized supplier-managed inventory
Support plant maintenance ordering for planned and unplanned work repair with catalog access to MRO and inventory materials and external services. Ensure parts replenishment is managed so that the right items and quantities are available in supplier-managed inventory.
Comprehensive spend management
Globally transform strategic sourcing and procurement processes to achieve economies of scale and cut costs across all spend categories, including direct and indirect materials, services, and contingent labor. Use sophisticated cost optimization tools such as what-if analyses to develop base pricing on specific commodity price indices.
Real Customers, Real Results

Evonik
“Using SAP Ariba Spot Buy, users were able to quickly find the items they needed in a matter of minutes that were policy approved. This enabled our strategic sourcing managers to reduce the need for low-volume suppliers for small company locations by having access to a marketplace with millions of items.”
Download case study
Henkel
“Technology allows us to speak the same language across Henkel. SAP Ariba solutions are key to connecting purchasing, supply chain, manufacturing, deliveries, and sales. They increase the resilience of our supply chains today and give us the tools to keep our finger on the pulse of tomorrow.”
Download case study
Sasol
“SAP Ariba’s reliability and versatility were the two key ingredients that improved our service level to the organization. By standardizing our procurement processes, it enabled us to have better visibility into our spend while improving efficiencies and significantly lower costs.”
Watch videoRelated Resources




Explore SAP Ariba Solutions
Supply Chain Collaboration
Share real-time information with all your direct spend suppliers, obtain their commits, and tap network-generated intelligence to achieve complete supply chain visibility.
Find out howSupplier Risk Management
Meet product quality and safety imperatives by making risk assessment and due diligence part of the procurement process. Tailor risk views and alerts to your business, to each supplier relationship, and to your role.
Supplier Risk Management