With this release, SAP Ariba plans will turn on the following existing features, which were previously optional and required contacting SAP Ariba to enable, for all customers:

• SM-5590: Bank component for supplier management questionnaires, which adds the question answer type Bank Account to template survey documents in supplier management project templates. Bank Account questions contain a set of pre-defined fields to collect supplier bank information and are automatically mapped to corresponding vendor.bankInfos fields. You can use Bank Account questions instead of collecting different supplier bank details in individual questions.
• SM-9657: Enhancements to supplier bank ID management, which automatically generates unique, sequential, numerical bank IDs and with optional country-specific prefixes adds them to the Bank Id field in Bank Account questions using optional country-specific prefixes. If you opt to include country-specific prefixes, you can define prefixes using the same system as an integrated SAP ERP, SAP S/4HANA, or SAP MDG system. These automatically-generated IDs prevent suppliers from entering invalid bank ID values and provide a systematic, sequential way of identifying supplier banks using IDs that the integrated system recognizes.

To adopt the bank component feature, add Bank Account questions to supplier management questionnaires as needed. The supplier bank ID enhancement feature only generates bank IDs for banks specified in Bank Account questions. If your site already uses Bank Account questions, new answers to those questions will include automatically-generated bank IDs starting with this release.

Prerequisites

To add Bank Account questions to survey documents in supplier management project templates, you must be a member of the Template Creator group. To import master data to define country-specific bank ID prefixes, you must be a member of the Customer Administrator group.

For automatic bank ID generation to work properly, enhancements to ERP data synchronization with external supplier management questionnaires (SM-15534) must also be enabled in your site. This feature pushes updates from the integrated ERP system to external registration and modular supplier management questionnaires when they are not in approval and is required to update bank answers with automatically generated bank IDs in the supplier view of questionnaires after the supplier has opened them for the first time.

To change the maximum length of the bank ID from the default of 4 characters, a customer administrator must edit the self-service configuration parameter Define the length of supplier bank IDs (Application.SM.BankIdSize) in Intelligent Configuration Manager. If you plan to use country-specific prefixes, make sure that the maximum bank ID size you define is at least one character longer than the prefixes you plan to define. To be unique, bank IDs must include at least one numerical value.

Changes to existing functionality

Once the bank ID enhancement is enabled, the Bank Id field in Bank Account questions in all internal and external supplier management questionnaires becomes read-only. Any bank IDs added to supplier records before this feature was enabled remain untouched after enablement.

Once a respondent has added a new bank account and SAP Ariba has generated a bank ID for it, the Country field in the Bank Account question also becomes read-only. When this occurs and the Bank Account question is not in a repeatable section the respondent can no longer edit or remove the bank country. Therefore, SAP Ariba recommends always using repeatable sections for Bank Account questions so that respondents can remove bank accounts if necessary.

User interface changes

This feature adds Bank Account to the Answer Type dropdown menus in survey documents in supplier management questionnaires.

Administrator interface changes

This feature adds the following new data import and export tasks to the Site Manager > Data Import/Export task in Ariba Administrator:

• Import Country-Specific Bank ID Prefix
• Export Country-Specific Bank ID Prefix

Related Information

• Collecting supplier bank information using Bank Account questions
• Defining country-specific bank ID prefixes for Bank Account questions
• Define the length of supplier bank IDs

Supplier Information & Performance Management
Supplier Lifecycle & Performance