Raises hand for another n=1 that I'm currently going through. My point being, it doesn't matter than you can get hold of someone because the bureaucracy is kafkaesque.
WTF has happened to Google?
We're a supplier being onboarded. We've been in on-boarding hell for about 2 months now.
We've completed the job and are still being passed around teams in order to get paid.
As an aside, one of the scourges of modern business is Ariba. Google use Ariba along with many other large organisations and it SUCKS.
It feels like using Ariba forces big companies to map their bureaucracy around its structure rather than the other way around ... which means people getting bounced from team to team while different queries are raised and some random person somewhere raises another query, etc etc ... and even the internal staff struggle to make things happen.
Whatever happens, it feels like the bureaucratic structure and use of Ariba has imprisoned staff at Google. They can't get beyond their own system now.
The process was a real eye-opener as to what goes on when a firm becomes huge.
In my experience, once a company implements Ariba, it's over and they're just cash-cowing it.
The savings they make in automation are costs passed on to the consumer or supplier in the hassle factor of getting things done. I want to say "Never again", but that's not entirely my choice.
/rant