As a supplier, you might often wonder whether your business should be ‘PunchOut ready’. Offering PunchOut capabilities can have several advantages. For instance you can make it simpler for your customers to do business with you. It enables you to better communicate with your buyers. However, the PunchOut catalog is maintained on the supplier’s side. That means you have to take the full responsibility about everything related to PunchOut solution that you are offering to your customer. So the question that arises is, whether it is necessary to implement PunchOut. Following are the factors that you need to consider before you decide to introduce this PunchOut feature.
6 Reasons you should Implement PunchOut Catalog
When you are dealing with B2B or B2G Customers Large corporations or Federal, State, and Local governments will prefer to do business with you, only if you are ready to provide PunchOut catalog. In fact, quite a few suppliers are providing PunchOut capabilities in order to retain some of their biggest customers. With a PunchOut, suppliers find it much easier to handle orders placed by buyers. For buyers with Ariba procurement system, the use of Ariba PunchOut catalog helps in improving the efficiency of their procurement process.
When you have a Dynamic Catalog If you are providing a catalog of static information and fixed pricing then making your website ‘PunchOut ready’ is not required. The buyer can easily import such static catalogs through their procurement system. However, in case you have a dynamic catalog whose content changes rapidly or frequently, it is necessary to make your website PunchOut enabled. This is because PeopleSoft PunchOut catalogs are dynamic, so any changes in your catalog can be directly accessed by the buyer in real time. In other words, you are able to provide real time price, description and availability of products.
When your Product Catalog is Huge When your catalog contains a large number of products, updating such a catalog that is in CIF format can be a nightmare. Updating a CIF catalog is a multi-step process and requires a lot of manual work. For instance, adding or deleting a product will require replacement of the entire CIF catalog, which is very time consuming, particularly when you have thousands of products. On the other hand, a SAP PunchOut catalog supports dynamic update means you can make changes in catalog in real time without republishing the entire catalog.