From paper to procurement effective catalogue creation and ...

Benefits
Content was loaded into the Supplier Hub as categorised content – using the Tiles category – the benefit
of loading categorised content is that product aliases, UNSPC codes, UNSPSC commodities, and categoryspecific
attributes are all automatically appended by the Supplier Hub to each product – this increases
the richness and utility value of the content for end users in buy-side and sell-side environments.
Additionally, by mapping the smartbuyTM category to the RUS category the supplier’s catalogue is
now in a format that can be automatically mapped to other industry standard catalogue schemas
– such as UNSPSC, eCl@ss, NATO, RosettaNet, PIDS, and NACS. This is beneficial to the supplier
as it opens up multiple opportunities for syndicating content with little additional effort or labour
required.
Conclusions and next steps
A supplier catalogue was successfully exchanged between the smartbuyTM system and the Cyberlynx
Supplier Hub. Manual intervention was required to map the smartbuyTM category with the Cyberlynx
category. Because smartbuyTM uses proprietary categories that do not correspond to any accepted
standards or schemas, it would be difficult to automate this mapping, though this could be
investigated further through the use of a well-defined consistently attributed content style guide.
The degree of effort is minimal, and will vary depending on the number of categories utilised in a
supplier’s catalogue. Images were included in the exercise. Department of Commerce are currently
addressing the loading & support of images in smartbuyTM .
smartbuy TM interoperability with Cyberlynx
(see also the Department of Commerce case study)
Background
Cyberlynx provided the Department of Commerce with a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, containing
catalogue content for Novel Innovations. The spreadsheet was exported from the Cyberlynx Supplier
Hub and adhered to the RUS schema (with RUS categories, common attributes and categoryspecific
attributes). The catalogue contained four (4) categories (Appointment Books, Picture Frames,
Note Pad Holders and Name Badge Holders) and 52 SKU’s.
smartbuyTM required additional attributes to create a supplier account. Some of the attributes
required were internal attributes and could not be provided by an external party, such as smartbuyTM ID, Det Supcode, etc. The Supplier Hub uses the company name to identify a supplier. smartbuyTM also requires the trading name, which is not typically required or collected when activating a
supplier on the Cyberlynx Supplier Hub and as such had to be determined.
Establishing the catalogue
As the supplier was new and the items they supplied fell into new categories, both categories and
category specific attributes had to be manually created in the smartbuyTM system. The Department of
Commerce created their own custom categories and attributes that necessitated the mapping between
the RUS categories and attributes and the newly created smartbuyTM categories and attributes. APPENDIX I
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 | 4 7