From paper to procurement effective catalogue creation and ...

S T E P 4 – D E V E L O P I N G YO U R C A T A L O G U E
Catalogue Development Steps
There are three steps in catalogue development:
1. Content creation and enablement – creating the catalogue and making it able to be put online in
a way that is capable of browse, search and ad hoc purchase, or automated purchase.
2. Publishing – making the catalogue available online via the models identified on pages 34-35.
3. Maintaining – keeping the catalogue up to date, including data synchronisation.
The process of creating, enabling, publishing and maintaining a catalogue can be quite a complex
task and there are a number of critical decisions that you will need to make regarding:
• catalogue structure;
• product classification standards (eg UNSPSC, EAN etc);
• pricing;
• product attributes;
• product identification codes;
• product display (including images);
• customer specific catalogues;
• contract related catalogues;
• buyer access; and
• security.
Catalogues may also need to address issues such as trading partner identification, trading partner
registration, data quality and cleansing, item master file management, messaging standards, GST
management, and related issues.
Trading partner identification is particularly important because the way you identify your partner in
your financial system may be different from the way your trading partner identifies themselves in
an online environment. For instance, you may need to “map” your vendor master file to your trading
partner identifiers (eg. their SKU’s) to gain access to catalogue content.
Addressing these issues can be done in conjunction with an existing catalogue service provider. (See
Step 6 – Getting Assistance)
As a supplier, you should already have a catalogue. Most likely if this is in electronic form, it will be
tabular such as a spreadsheet or a database table. Such tables are readily exportable and could become
the basis of an electronic catalogue. They will however, probably not contain all of the information that
an electronic catalogue will require such as supplier identification codes that your buyers give you. The
advantage, however is that such codes and information can be added when an electronic catalogue is
produced. Two types of information will need to be added to your existing catalogue including:
• product categorisation; and
• external links.
F R O M P A P E R T O P R O C U R E M E N T – E F F E C T I V E C A T A L O G U E C R E A T I O N A N D M A N A G E M E N T F O R E N G A G I N G B U Y E R S A N D S U P P L I E R S | 31
MAKING YOUR ELECTRONIC CATALOGUE