A historic brick of the purchasing information system, deployed to facilitate and frame the ordering process, catalog management is finding a new youth. The explosion of consumer e-commerce combined with the search for savings have created new needs for purchases.
Suddenly, several e-purchase publishers (B-pack, Ivalua, Oxalys Technologies, Pool4Tool, SynerTrade, etc.) have just announced innovations in electronic catalog management. It must be said that in projects covering the e-procurement chain, demand has become almost systematic, for features in line with e-commerce standards and ever more extensive coverage of categories. Because the benefits of these tools, many, are increasingly perceived. For purchasing departments, using catalogues is first and foremost a way of framing practices, ensuring compliance with internal contracts and proceduress.s. Catalogues also contribute to the control of the purchasing strategy, making it easier to compare offers and direct orders to certain suppliers or products. This saves a considerable amount of time, since it is no longer necessary to ask for quotes or to conduct negotiations, and expenses avoided.
While, on average, the coverage of electronic catalogues currently in place in companies rarely exceeds half the amount of their purchases, deployment should accelerate.
What for?
Essentially because the historical barriers are falling. Suppliers, who have been rather reluctant so far, finally understand their interest in terms of visibility and quality of orders received: standardized documents, up-to-date data, reduced number of errors, etc. For their part, the operational (prescribers, end customers, etc.), now accustomed to the standards of e-commerce in their daily lives, demand this same type of tool in their professional framework to order items on terms negotiated upstream, in a simple and fast way. With some echo from the publishers, like B-pack which indicates that its latest version offers an "integration of Amazon e-commerce directly into the procurement". Or SynerTrade, which plans to launch "a new Amazon-style catalogue shopping platform" before the summer, Webshop. Oxalys Technologies, like Perfect Commerce, also offers complementary sorting, comparison, etc. features.
But the deployment of projects should also accelerate due to the functional enrichment of solutions, in particular to simplify the work of purchasing teams. Some business publishers, which relied on specialized solutions to deliver advanced features, even revised their strategy. In place of Wallmedien, Pool4Tool has developed its own catalog management tool. "While the e-procurement module is increasingly being used for indirect purchases, but also for requests for direct purchases, to integrate the catalog management (loading, checking/validation, activation...) within our suite allows us to have a unified user experience (buyer and supplier) and in direct connection with the workflow module," explains Bertrand Maltaverne, senior business consultant at the Austrian publisher. It's also for streamline the relationship between buyers and suppliers Ivalua recently strengthened catalog management in its Buyer suite. In general, the tools are more open to suppliers by offering input forms, spaces to file files or catalogue preview interfaces that will be deployed by their contractors.
From a purely functional point of view, the challenge for publishers is above all to propose a simplified administration. Of course, for complex categories to manage (many features, technical annexes, photos, etc.) or single-supplier, the punch out approach already allows to decentralize the management of catalogs, hosted directly in the source system. However, it has one major drawback: the variety of interfaces, since orders are placed directly into the vendor's platform. In response, B-Pack claims that the "new generation" of its solution allows data from punch out or online catalogs to be retrieved directly. Now, more and more solutions are also offering global management features of the catalogue lifecycle To facilitate the work of buyers, for example using dashboards pointing out anomalies (gaps, inconsistencies, obsolescence, etc.), usually supplemented with alert mechanisms. "Ultimately, before controlling the effective application of the negotiated conditions, the challenge is to improve the quality of the catalogues made available to the operational staff," sums up Gérard Dahan, director of Ivalua EMEA.