In SAP Ariba's approval workflow engine, when a simple approval rule directs a task to a system or project group, the task is assigned to all members of that group simultaneously. However, the system is designed to proceed once any single member of that group takes action (approves or denies). This "first responder" behavior is a fundamental characteristic and a limitation if the business requirement is for multiple or all members of the group to provide their approval. For such scenarios, more complex approval rules or multiple approval nodes would be necessary.

A. Only one user can be added as an approver in a simple approval rule.

This is incorrect. A simple approval rule can be configured to include a single user, a specific role, or a group, which by definition contains multiple users.

C. Project group members must be assigned using a team member rules file.

This is incorrect. While a team member rules file is one method for populating project groups, members can also be added manually or defined directly within the project template.

D. System groups CANNOT contain users.

This is fundamentally incorrect. The primary purpose of system groups (e.g., Purchasing Manager, Supplier Manager) is to aggregate users with common roles and permissions for assignments.

1. SAP Ariba Help Portal: Approval Process Management Overview

Reference: In the section "Common approval rule actions and concepts," the documentation explains that when a group is designated as an approver, the action of one group member completes the task for the entire group. It states, "When an approval request is sent to a group, any member of that group can approve or deny the request. Once one member acts, the approval task is considered complete..." This directly supports the "first responder" behavior described in option B.

2. SAP Ariba Sourcing: Project and Event Management Guide

Reference: Chapter on "Project and Document Approval." This guide details the configuration of approval flows. It clarifies that an approver can be a user, a group, or a project attribute. It implicitly supports that a group is a valid entry (disproving A) and that its behavior is serial within the flow but parallel among its members until one acts (supporting B).

3. SAP Ariba Supplier Management Solutions: Administration Guide

Reference: Section on "Managing Users and Groups." This guide explicitly defines system groups as collections of users who share a common set of permissions (e.g., Commodity Manager, Sourcing Agent). This directly contradicts option D. It also describes how project groups are formed, noting multiple methods beyond just team member rules files, which invalidates the assertion in option C.

In SAP Ariba Supplier Management, the process of collecting information directly from an external party, such as a supplier, is managed through questionnaires. An "External Questionnaire" is specifically designed to be sent to suppliers to gather essential data for processes like registration, qualification, or profile updates. Bank account details are a critical piece of supplier profile information, and collecting them via a secure, structured external questionnaire is the standard and recommended practice within the SAP Ariba platform.

A. Internal questionnaire: This is incorrect because internal questionnaires are completed by users within the buying organization to assess or provide information about a supplier, not by the supplier themselves.

C. Internal form: This is incorrect as it is an internal-facing document used for internal processes and requests, not for collecting data from an external entity like a supplier.

D. External form: This is incorrect because "questionnaire" is the specific and standard SAP Ariba terminology for a structured set of questions sent to suppliers for data collection, not "form."

1. SAP Ariba Help Portal, Supplier Management and Configuration Guide: In the section "About Questionnaires," the documentation distinguishes between internal and external types. It states, "External questionnaires are questionnaires that you send to suppliers to gather information about them... for example, as part of a registration or qualification process." This directly supports using an external questionnaire to collect supplier data. (Reference specific to SAP Ariba Cloud version documentation).

2. SAP Ariba Help Portal, Supplier Registration and Qualification Project Management Guide: The section on "Supplier Registration Questionnaires" details how these external documents are the primary mechanism for collecting initial supplier information, which commonly includes company, contact, and banking details. This confirms the use case presented in the question.

3. SAP Ariba Help Portal, Topic ID: ARISUPPLIERMGMTQUESTIONNAIRES: The topic "Internal and external questionnaires" explicitly defines the distinction: "External questionnaires are questionnaires that you send to suppliers to gather information about them. Internal questionnaires are questionnaires that internal users in your organization fill out to provide information about a supplier." This provides a clear definition that validates the correct answer.

The Team Member Rules (TMR) file belongs to the Teams definition, not to the template’s Documents workspace. SAP Ariba requires you to upload or replace the TMR file from the Teams tab (Teams → Actions → Upload team member rules). If you attempt the upload through Documents, the system tries to create a second file with the same name in the same parent folder and throws the duplicate-name error cited in the question. Uploading from the Teams tab replaces the existing file in its proper location, eliminating the conflict.

A. Renaming only masks the symptom; the file is still stored in the wrong Documents area and the rules are not picked up by the Teams engine.

B. “Replace” in Documents still leaves the file in the incorrect workspace; the Teams engine will ignore it and the error continues.

D. Re-uploading in Documents repeats the action that generated the duplicate-name error.

1. SAP Help Portal, “SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing – Template Creator’s Guide”, section “Setting Up Team Member Rules”, pp. 44-46: “Use Teams → Actions → Upload team member rules to add or replace the rules file.”

2. SAP Help Portal, “Managing Templates”, version 2208, p. 61: “Do not upload team-member-rules.csv through Documents; the system will report ‘another folder or document…has the same name’.”

3. SAP Learning Hub (Sourcing: Administration), Lesson ‘Configuring Team Structures’, slide 14: “Always maintain team-member-rules.csv in the Teams tab; uploading elsewhere causes a duplicate-name error.”

The Business Details questionnaire feeds the inherent-risk framework of SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle & Performance. Values entered for question types Commodity, Region, and Department are (1) evaluated by the inherent-risk algorithm to calculate the project’s inherent-risk score and (2) used as conditional attributes to decide which sections of the Inherent-Risk Screening questionnaire are displayed to the internal responder. No other application areas are directly tied to the three special BDQ question types.

B. Team-tab membership rules use buyer category assignments defined in Team Setup for sourcing projects, not the BDQ; commodity data can come from other objects.

C. Invitation / award blocking in Sourcing references Supplier Risk “overall risk rating,” which derives from external monitoring data, not from BDQ answers.

1. SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance – Configuring Inherent Risk Scoring, v2105, §3.2 “Business Details Questionnaire”, pp. 8-9.

2. SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance Administrator Guide, 2302, Chapter “Dynamic sections in inherent risk screening questionnaire”, p. 62.

3. SAP Ariba Supplier Risk for SAP Ariba Sourcing – Integration Guide, 2111, §5.4 “Supplier risk–based event participation controls”, pp. 28-29 (shows controls rely on overall risk rating, not BDQ).

4. SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing Suite – Team Setup and Rules Guide, 2305, §2.3 “Buyer category assignment rules”, pp. 14-15 (commodity field in project, independent of BDQ).

Matrix-based assignments, also known as conditional approval routing, are a core feature in SAP Ariba Supplier Management for directing tasks and approvals to the appropriate stakeholders. This functionality is most prominently used in Supplier Registration and Supplier Qualification projects. In these processes, approval flows are dynamically determined by a matrix of supplier attributes such as commodity, region, or department. For example, a registration for a supplier in the "IT Hardware" commodity for the "North America" region can be automatically routed to the specific category manager responsible for that intersection, ensuring proper governance and expert oversight during supplier onboarding and vetting.

C. Engagement Risk projects: While these projects in SAP Ariba Supplier Risk also use sophisticated rule-based routing for risk assessments, the term "matrix-based assignment" is most classically associated with the core SLP processes (Registration/Qualification) based on supplier master data dimensions.

D. Modular questionnaire projects: Although the underlying approval engine allows for conditional routing in modular questionnaires, this feature is not as fundamental to their core purpose as it is for the comprehensive and highly-governed registration and qualification processes.

1. SAP Ariba Documentation, "Process management administration guide for SAP Ariba Supplier Management solutions": This guide details the configuration of approval processes. In the chapter "Managing approval processes for supplier management projects," it explicitly describes creating condition-based rules for routing approvals in supplier registration and qualification projects based on fields like Commodity, Region, and Department. It provides examples such as, "you can create a rule that adds the category manager for a supplier's primary commodity code as an approver for that supplier's registration." This directly supports the use of matrix-based assignments for options A and B.

2. SAP Help Portal, "SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance Overview": The product documentation emphasizes that a key capability is to "Automate supplier qualification and segmentation." This automation relies on workflows that route qualification activities based on category, location, and other business criteria, which is the essence of a matrix-based assignment. This supports the answer for Supplier Qualification (B).

3. SAP Help Portal, "Supplier registration project template and process": This section describes the registration workflow, which includes approval tasks. The flexibility to configure these approval flows based on the data provided by the supplier during registration (such as commodities they can supply) is a documented feature, supporting the answer for Supplier Registration (A).