Manila, Philippines, and Sunnyvale, CA — July 28, 2003 — Ariba Inc., an enterprise spend management (ESM) provider, today announced that San Miguel Corp., a food, beverage and packaging company in Asia, has chosen the Ariba Spend Management solution to automate and manage its lifecycle of spend company-wide — an estimated $2 billion — from planning to payment.
Dubbed Project STEP-UP (SMC Technology Enabled Procurement — Unlimited Potential), the initiative is supposed to improve San Miguel's daily purchasing processes, reduce cycle times, consolidate suppliers and reduce purchasing costs.
The packaging company said Project STEP-UP is a key component of its efforts to consolidate and integrate operations from its recent acquisitions, and to continue its regional growth. It will help San Miguel aggregate purchasing power and knowledge across the organization, channel spend to preferred suppliers, negotiate better contracts and ensure compliance against those contracts.
"Project STEP-UP aims to transform procurement at San Miguel through increased spend visibility and information, and the creation of a uniform, automated buying process, and by enabling us to locate and work with the best suppliers available in order to deliver quality goods at competitive prices to our customers," said Gerardo Payumo, vice president and director of Purchasing, San Miguel Corp. "After careful analysis, we are confident that Ariba Spend Management is the right set of solutions to make this possible."
Integration of the Ariba solutions to San Miguel's back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, including SAP applications, will be managed by San Miguel's IT team, and will extend across 11 business units. TransProcure, a procurement services company of Asia, will provide procurement services and local support. The first phase of deployment will commence in August.
