Most customers do as you describe, provide consultants with personal logins. In order to keep track of the consultants, we suggest making a custom system groups called Consultants. That way when you want to know who is a consultant and who isn’t, you just look at the membership of the group. Here are some additional ideas:
- All consultant names start with CONS, i.e. CONS-Sally Smith. That would make it easy to search for the consultants.
- Also, you could create UIDs such as Consultant 1, Consultant 2, Consultant 3. When a consultant starts work, they would be assigned one of these and the name and email address would be changed for the consultant. So, when Sally Smith starts working for you, she is assigned to Consultant 3 and the name is changed to Sally Smith and the email to Sally@company.com.
At any time that it’s necessary, a UID can be deactivated and locked.
For the second part of your question, there is no automation in Ariba to support the idea of expiring logins or access during certain periods. This concept would be a great idea for an enhancement request.