From paper to procurement effective catalogue creation and ...

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W H Y D O YO U N E E D A N E L E C T R O N I C C A T A L O G U E ?
A supplier’s catalogue is often the central reference for many other business processes within an
organisation. A company who sells car parts, for instance, would find it difficult, if not impossible,
to operate without a list of those parts. Concurrently, it would find it difficult to survive without
having access to its suppliers’ catalogues on which it would rely for inventory, stock availability and
pricing information.
As a supplier, if your catalogue data is not available electronically then you will not be able to link with
external systems, for example a buyer’s e-procurement system. The buyer will be forced to enter your
company’s data manually into their purchasing system(s) which could pose a major effort given the
size of some catalogues and the number of suppliers that a buyer typically deals with.
The management of core data – from a simple over-the-counter sales system to a fully-fledged
e-business trading system - is a prime consideration when trading electronically. Central to the
process is the use of recognised national and international standards (see page 28). The application of
recognised standards will make your e-catalogue far more flexible and scalable: ie. your data will be in
a better structure to be able to be transformed and read by the numerous e-procurement technologies
used by buyers, resellers and e-marketplaces.
Fig 1. Illustrates the relationship within a typical buying organisation between the electronic
catalogue and other business systems
Accounting Systems
Costs and controls
Pricing and product info
Catalogue Context
Pricing and products
Catalogue
Master Data
(eg Products)
Requests for info
Product information
Transaction
information
Purchasing Systems
Product updates
Product information
Reporting Systems Sales Systems