Integrating a Digital Product Catalogue with Your Procure-to-Pay (P2P) Suite

Static (Hosted) Catalogues A static catalogue is the most basic information about a supplier’s product; raw data such as name, limited description, price and sometimes pictures. Static catalogue data is given to the buyer’s P2P suite controller, often in Excel format and uploaded into the buyer’s suite. Loading this type of catalogue is a manual process, so some buyers find it difficult to keep product description, inventory, and pricing data up to date. Additionally, static catalogues do not allow a supplier to market new products to buyers leading to suppliers sourcing from new suppliers and building a long tail of suppliers, when an existing supplier may already supply the product they need. Buyers are able to search their P2P suite for these items, but due to the limited information, it makes it difficult for them to make an educated buying decision. That is one key reason some buyers prefer punch-out catalogues. However, many other buyers like hosted catalogues for the higher degree of control they provide over any revisions that need to be made, so despite the extra work involved, some companies maintain very large hosted catalogues on their P2P suite.

Request for quote (RFQ)

Demand

Quotation

Products

Digital Catalogue

Purchase requisition

Pay

Order

Receive

Receive

Purchase Order

Receipts

Goods

Payment

On the other hand, punch-out catalogues are dynamic so they offer various advantages, including the ability to provide real-time pricing and availability. They have many configuration capabilities, accommodation for almost limitless product documentation, product information and other information to support decision making. Because they can provide an enhanced customer service with a very high-tech user experience, punch-out catalogues are generally the better choice for complex, service-oriented, larger catalogues with many SKUs and line items; or goods that require updates on price, description and content; and a high number of transactions, such as the office, workplace and PPE supplies sold by Lyreco. Punch-out (Dynamic) Catalogues

“Technically, the majority of the P2P suites communicate with one of two languages, HTML or Idocs for SAP based platforms and cXML for Oracle based platforms. Nowadays we are witnessing the rise of APIs, and the most common language is neither HTML (SAP) nor cXML (Oracle), but JSON, with which Lyreco is also compatible.”

Nopadol Thumnium E-business Manager Lyreco Thailand