Hi Michael:
Thanks for the question. I contacted Sharon Horton with the Ariba Best Practice Center and she offered the following guidance:
“A number of our customers have loaded up to 25,000 or more contracts using legacy load. It is true that the contracts data and documents have to be assembled for the zip file, this also depends on whether the data resided in electronic form in the first place. Obviously, converting from paper is the most labor intensive, but will probably ensure a consistent set of data. Many of the complaints about converting from other electronic formats is that the data is inconsistent.
We also advise to start this load with the most active contracts and generally with the Masters. Closed and/or expired contracts add low immediate value to the repository whereas getting the most current contracts in allows on-going work in the new system.
Some customers don’t bother at first with NDAs and/or certificates of insurance. Later, these are incorporated into the repository as new workspaces are created for particular suppliers or as part of a supplier management process.
Note that when doing the load, the zip file size limit is 100Meg, which means you can load a lot of contracts when the document file size is small, but if you have large document sizes (e.g. files stored as .tiffs) you may only be able to load a few contracts at a time.
Some customers actually prefer loading their important contracts by hand, but this should be limited to perhaps the most important or active 100-200 contracts. This isn’t practical for all 8,000 contracts.”
I hope this guidance is helpful as you explore using ACW.
Debbie Curtis-Magley
Ariba Exchange Community Manager