The deal entails the renewal of the Ariba procurement software support and maintenance solutions from Arivia.

Transnet has been using Ariba for the past five years. However, in meeting the demands of CEO Maria Ramos's directive to cut costs, Transnet opted to stop investing in the Ariba program in 2004.

In order to keep the contract open, Arivia.kom's Ariba team responded to the cost-cutting challenges by developing and supporting the TSN in-house portal, with resultant licence savings. The TSN in-house portal aims to provide consistent infrastructure for exchanging business documents and conducting transactions online to the global community of buyers and suppliers. It is designed to enable suppliers to join at no cost to them, and aims to provide buyers with access to both static catalogues and dynamic configuring of goods and services.

It was because of the TSN portal that Transnet kept the contract with Arivia.kom open.

Thagaran Govender, Group CIO of Transnet, says: "The TSN procurement portal has saved our business R6 million in software licence fees."