eProcurement Punchout Development
Get More from Your System with Punchout Functionality
Creating an eProcurement Punchout Catalog is becoming more important for both buyers and suppliers. We will connect you with companies, their procurement systems and the staff that use them.
Our clients provide us with complex software problems. By using our knowledge of both eProcurement and the unique needs of the business we formulate solutions that allow the software to support their business objectives.
The Discovery Process
We interview clients, staff and management to understand what provides the most value
Building the Solution
Using this information provides accurate costs and the people needed to achieve the solution
Involving Everybody in Testing
We get everybody's input, and understand how the new system fits into their existing roles
Launching the New System
We migrate data from the old to the new system. Knowing where data is stored and how it's secured
Support & Maintenance
Well built system's have lower maintenance & support costs, allowing for more features & value
eProcurement Development Case Study:
Punchout Ordering System
John O'rourke
10 Minute read September 2021
Table of Contents
About the Client
A promotional merchandise company with offices worldwide, who had a history of winning large corporate clients. They already had several “punchout” connections to their large customers, and were very familiar with the benefits of integrating directly with customer systems.
The Problem
The client’s sales effort was working very well, and being able to offer their customers a “punchout” or “single sign-on” made it more attractive to larger companies. A “punchout” or “single sign-on” is a technology that lets your customers go from their internal system directly to your website, without having another password to remember.
Setting up these connections was becoming more difficult and costly, because up to this point, each setup was done individually. There was no centralised management or documentation of the different connections. To add to the difficulty, some of the customers had systems that did not use one of the industry standard methods to communicate!
To add another challenge, some customers needed specific “mapping” of the data from one system to another – for example, one customer’s eProcurement system sent a combined “name”, but the e-Commerce system wanted separate first and last names for the users.
The Solution
We created a centralised system which could “speak” all the different standards used by procurement systems. It allowed for plug-in modules so we were able to connect it to different e-commerce systems, such as Shopify, AIM Smarter, and Magento. It connects those e-Commerce websites to procurement systems such as SAP Ariba, Workday, Coupa, Oracle and Ivalua. We then created a central register of all the connections, and a process for the set up of any new clients.
An Example of Punch Out Purchasing
Outcomes
The sales team were able to remove rekeying of orders for many accounts, and both customers and staff no longer had to worry about creating user accounts and resetting passwords. With the advent of GDPR, this became even more important because it provided assurance to all parties that their employee data was stored and used in a controlled way.
Sales staff now actively talk to customers about integrating with their systems, because everybody in the business understands the value of removing a lot of administrative work.
Setup costs per customer came down, because the system had pre-set configurations for the most common uses. This was even true when some “mapping” was required, such as the first/last name issue described above.
Overall, the system allowed the same team to support a growing number of orders and clients, by keeping administrative overheads down.
The Process
Discovering What’s Needed
This particular project was driven more by technical needs than user needs. Users would end up with at least the same result, and were not asking for more, but we needed to be able to handle more volume and many more connections.
The first step was to identify all the different…
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