With over 100 e-Procurement systems in use today managing hosted catalogs can be challenging. Even within the same platform, two customers can require two different hosted catalog upload formats. From Ariba to Coupa to Jaggaer to Zycus, each platform has its own proprietary format including product names, descriptions, images and UNSPSCs.
Managing all the data can prove daunting and a lot of manual work, not just in sheer volume of data but the differences between each platform. Creating one file for Meplato vs. Ariba can be a fair amount of work, but that’s just one file and a manual process in Excel. Then there is the challenge of uploading successfully to the e-Procurement platform. Often times even after a file is successfully uploaded, a client’s business validation rules are then applied which requires further adjustments to the file mapping.
If the specification that your team has is from three months ago and the UNSPSC has changed, the file may need to be regenerated with those new UNSPSCs. Within the Greenwing Hosted Catalog Service changing that mapping is a matter of changing the UNSPSC mapping and clicking the regenerate file link. A few minutes later you have your file ready with the latest version to submit to your customer.
That’s what our new catalog management platform does for you. Our team has taken our in-house catalog generation tools and merged it with our web-based interface to allow the creation of any catalog format. Check out our animated video to further explain how it works:
How does it all work?
The process starts by getting a master data feed from your team. This data feed can be automated to update daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually. Once this master data feed is setup you can start submitting hosted catalog projects. Our team simply needs your customers template, customer specific pricing (if not part of the master data feed) and any specific business rules that may apply to that customer, such as custom UNSPSCs or separate lookup tables.
Can we apply different business rules to each catalog?
Yes, you can apply different business rules to each catalog. If one customer should get one set of UNSPSCs or UOM conversions, we can accommodate that since each customer gets their own catalog generation process.
How often can I generate hosted catalogs?
You can generate catalogs on a daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/annual schedule or request them to be generated as needed with a single click in the web interface.
How can you deliver files to my customer?
We can deliver via email, encrypted link (Google Drive/Dropbox/etc.), physical media (USB Drives, CDs, DVDs), SFTP, custom APIs.
Do I have to submit hosted catalogs myself?
You certainly can use our catalog management platform to create the files and make them available to your team, but if you subscribe to our full catalog management platform you can have our team do all the heavy lifting for you. This includes chasing customers to ensure the file was not only submitted in the correct format, but also ensuring it was uploading to their procurement platform and on what date.
To learn more contact our sales team at 1-877-415-3237.