From paper to procurement effective catalogue creation and ...

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These are the same areas you should have already considered in terms of your existing business.
However, there are differences when you move into the online environment as one of the areas you
will need to consider are the standards your buyers use in the online world.
Standards
Standards are important in determining how to put your catalogue online for your buyers. Without
such standards, everyone would adopt their own way of doing things making it almost impossible
to work easily with trading partners. Standards are important for transformation and portability of
content from one system to another and for scalability, flexibility and re-use.
However, as demonstrated in the section on “The Business Problem”, differing standards can cause
pain for suppliers. So where does this leave you, the supplier? With multiple standards, multiple
buyers asking suppliers to provide data conforming to “their” standard, and with multiple flavours
of standards (cxml, xml, ebxml for example) it is understandable that many suppliers continue to
use paper-based catalogues.
It is difficult to justify the cost of reworking the same catalogue data again and again to service
different customers and requests when, more often than not, there is no definable benefit in doing so.
Nevertheless, it may limit your ability to open up new channels or to better serve existing sales channels.
It is a question of “if” and “then”. As a supplier, you may ask: “if” I were able to provide my catalogue
data once and have it accessible to customers through a range of channels would it “then” result in
additional sales?
Global Product Standards
Using nationally and internationally recognised standards in constructing your electronic catalogue
will provide your catalogue with more portability and re-useability. For example, you can use the
ABN to identify a trading partner or EAN-UCC for identifying a product.
There are a number of common standards used for electronic catalogues. In particular, you will need
to determine which standard your buyers and suppliers use and how best to approach catalogue
interoperability with them. The most common standards are:
UNSPSC
The Universal Standard Products and Services Classification (UNSPSC) system is an open global
coding system that classifies products and services. The UNSPSC system is used extensively around
the world in electronic catalogues, search engines, procurement application systems and accounting
systems.
eCl@ss
Although still evolving, eCl@ss is a product classification system that intends to be used as an
industry standard between suppliers and their customers. eCl@ss features a hierarchical, four level
classification key with a keyword index containing 14,000 items.