Ariba vs BirchStreet

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Our analysts compared Ariba vs BirchStreet based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Procurement Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Ariba Software Tool

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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BirchStreet is a cloud-based P2P platform that uses diverse tools to improve and streamline business operations. It helps transform, optimize and digitize the shipping scene by granting maximum visibility and compiling customizable reports to streamline workflows. It is also a one-stop solution to order, track, manage and receive items while obtaining real-time alerts.
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$50 Monthly
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$142 Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
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Product Assistance

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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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  • Effective Budget Management: Birchstreet received a 100 SelectHub analyst rating for its budget management module. It lets you create budgets, import and export information, set purchase order limits, assign budgets to specific time periods, and reserve funds for taxes, charges and discounts on requisitions. The checkbook drill-down tool provides an overview of transactions affecting departmental or GL account budgets. You can also manually edit budgets and approval workflows and track spending by department or time period.
  • Streamlined Reporting: The platform got full marks (100) for its reporting and dashboard tools from our analysts. You get every key reporting feature out of the box, including report templates, custom filters, automated report scheduling and multi-level report access permissions. It offers pre-built dashboards on spend visibility and compliance and report templates on inventory, purchase orders, closing variance, item costs and more.
  • Efficient Requisition Management: Another strong feature is the platform’s requisitioning toolkit, which offers 88% of all key features ready to use out of the box. You can set approval workflows, evaluate bids using filters, create RFQs, convert purchase requests into orders and replicate previously ordered items. The platform automates approval reminders and calculates tax and freight charges for specific line items in purchase orders (PO) or invoice slips.
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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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  • Procurement: You can generate purchase requisitions and orders and receive real-time tracking information. Electronically send RFQs directly to suppliers and access their up-to-date product catalogs with real-time pricing. Create custom approval workflows to adhere to your purchasing policies. Build custom order guides containing frequently purchased items and use analytics tools to gain insights into your spending patterns.
  • AP Auto-Matching: The three-way auto-matching feature compares invoices with purchase orders and receiving reports to ensure accuracy and streamline reconciliation. Gain complete visibility of payment status throughout the procure-to-pay cycle. You can ensure international tax compliance with a built-in tax calculator or manually enter invoice details to meet unique business needs.
  • Invoice Management: Allow suppliers to send PDFs directly and enable the vendors' data-entry team to accurately record invoice details. Manage multiple invoice types, including PO, non-PO and credit memos. The platform can identify exceptions that help minimize delays and frustrations. Additionally, it automatically codes non-PO invoices based on your rules.
  • Inventory Management: Set strategic inventory automation like implementing a just-in-time approach or hedging against potential supply chain disruptions. Use line-on-the-bottle technology to scan outlet inventory. The real-time variance reporting identifies discrepancies and suggests actions to minimize risks. Maintain accurate valuations using an automated system that updates inventory prices in real time based on received data. The platform automatically decrements outlet stock based on POS sales, ensuring inventory levels always reflect actual demand.
  • Recipe Management: Gain accurate food cost visibility to make informed decisions about menu offerings and pricing strategies. You can create recipe cards with ingredients, quantities, step-by-step instructions, images and videos to maintain recipe consistency across locations. Identify areas prone to shrinkage by integrating with POS systems and enabling "Recipe to Requisition to Inventory" functionalities. This closed-loop approach provides a holistic view of food usage, helping pinpoint and minimize waste.
  • Birchstreet Pay: Electronically send supplier payments using a native payment processor with competitive processing rates. The vendor offers a dedicated team to help suppliers transition to virtual cards, offering potential cash-back opportunities.
  • Operational Insights: Track key performance indicators for purchase orders and invoices and benchmark them against industry averages to identify areas for improvement. You can analyze confirming and late PO rates, non-PO invoice rates, and straight-through invoice processing. View a breakdown of invoices by origin, including IMS, OCR, EDI and manual entry. Monitor EDI invoice error rates to ensure smooth data flow.
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Product Ranking

#1

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Procurement Software

#36

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Analyst Rating Summary

84
72
we're gathering data
100
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31
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100
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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

Ariba
BirchStreet
+ Add Product + Add Product
Budget Management Contract Management Dashboard And Reporting Invoice Management Mobile Capabilities Native Integration And Extensibility Platform Capabilities Product Catalog Purchase Orders Management Receiving And Inventory Management Requisitions Sourcing Spend Management Supplier Management 100 31 100 82 37 60 71 70 75 74 88 64 79 68 0 25 50 75 100
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Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

33%
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67%
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83%
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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 1222 reviews
Great User Sentiment 18 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.

85%
of users recommend this product

BirchStreet has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 85% when considering 18 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

4.9 (14)
n/a
4.1 (451)
5.0 (2)
3.5 (48)
n/a
4.3 (355)
4.2 (14)
4.1 (354)
4.0 (2)

Awards

we're gathering data

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated BirchStreet and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Budget Management.

Budget Management Award

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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Streamlined Procurement Processes: BirchStreet automates many procurement tasks, such as purchase order creation and invoice processing, which saves time and reduces errors.
Improved Spend Visibility: The platform provides real-time insights into spending patterns, allowing businesses to track expenses and identify cost-saving opportunities.
Enhanced Compliance: BirchStreet helps organizations enforce purchasing policies and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.
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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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Reporting limitations: Users express frustration with the limitations of the reporting functionality, finding it difficult to extract specific data or customize reports to meet their needs.
System glitches: Users report encountering occasional system glitches or errors that disrupt their workflow and require troubleshooting.
Complex user interface: Some users find the system's interface to be complex and not very user-friendly, requiring extensive training and experience to navigate efficiently.
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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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Users praise BirchStreet for its user-friendly interface, robust features, and top-notch customer support. One user raved that BirchStreet is "the best procurement software I've ever used," while another shared that it "saved me hours of time each week." BirchStreet's ease of use is a major selling point, allowing users to quickly adapt to the platform and maximize their efficiency. Users also highlight the software's comprehensive functionality, enabling them to manage purchase orders, track shipments, and cultivate strong supplier relationships, all within a single, centralized system. This streamlines operations and reduces the need for multiple, disparate tools. While specific comparisons to competitors are limited in available reviews, BirchStreet's strengths lie in its user-centric design and comprehensive feature set, making it a compelling choice for businesses seeking a powerful yet intuitive procurement solution. BirchStreet seems to be a great fit for businesses of all sizes looking to streamline their procurement processes and boost efficiency. Its intuitive design makes it accessible to users with varying levels of technical expertise, while its powerful features cater to the complex needs of larger organizations. If you're searching for a procurement software that can simplify your operations and save you valuable time, BirchStreet might just be the ticket. However, remember that software is constantly evolving, so it's always a good idea to check the latest reviews and updates before making a decision.

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