Use procurement catalogs
Create and manage catalogs
There are three types of catalogs in the procurement module.
- Procurement catalogs
- Vendor catalogs
- External catalogs
Purchasing professionals can create and maintain catalogs of the items and services that can be purchased for internal use in an organization by setting up these catalogs. After you create products, you can create procurement catalogs to group the products that internal users can buy, you can create vendor catalogs that contain the products you purchase from vendors and setup external catalogs.
After catalogs are set up in Procurement and sourcing > Catalogs > Procurement catalogs, company employees can create purchase requisitions to order from them. The catalogs can be used to enforce purchasing policies so that employees can order only the items and services that are allowed for their buying legal entity.
To set up a catalog and make it available to employees, you must do the following tasks.
- Configure your procurement category hierarchy before you create the catalog.
- Determine which products you want your employees to be able to order. You can show or hide specific products in a catalog node, or you can show or hide all the products in a node.
- Determine how many procurement catalogs you require. Access to
a procurement catalog is determined by the catalog policy rule
that you configure for the legal entity and operating unit that an
employee is assigned to.
- Employees can order a product only if it's in the active procurement catalog for your organization, and if it's in an enabled node and not hidden.
- The product must also fall within a category accessible to employees in accordance with the category access policy rule.
- If no catalog policy rule is defined, the category access rule alone determines the products that an employee can order on the requisition.
- Determine how you want users to navigate through the vendor catalog by using the procurement policies.
- Select the products that users can view and order.
- Add access to vendor websites, if users are permitted to order directly from a vendor, such as ordering office supplies. This requires Procurement and sourcing > Catalogs > External catalogs to be configured. This is also called PunchOut eProcurement.
- Activate the catalog so that users can view the catalog.
- Update the catalog with product or catalog changes.
Set up a catalog
After the prerequisites have been met, you can set up catalogs. You can create either one catalog that your whole organization uses or multiple catalogs that the various divisions in your organization use. If you create one catalog for the whole organization, access to the catalog is controlled by your purchasing policy rules.
The catalog defines which products are available when purchase requisitions are created, but you can use category access policy rules to apply additional restrictions. Because the nodes in a catalog are procurement categories, they can be suppressed by a category access policy rule. In this case, the products in that category are not available for employees to use on requisitions. You can define category access policy rules on the Purchasing policies page.
When a purchasing agent creates a catalog, they must define whether the catalog is updated manually or automatically and must specify the catalog owner.
Updates are published either automatically or manually, depending on the option that you select for the catalog in the Default update type field on the Catalogs page. The following default update types are available for catalogs:
- Dynamic - The catalog is automatically updated whenever it's changed.
- Static - The catalogs must be manually updated.
Because the products are inherited from the procurement categories, they all appear in the appropriate catalog nodes. Purchasing agents can control whether all products in a node are hidden or shown when the catalog is used in a purchase requisition. Purchasing agents can also control whether individual products in a node are hidden or shown.
Before a catalog is available for employees to use in a requisition, you must define a catalog policy rule for the catalog, set the catalog's status to Active, and publish the catalog. Purchasing agents can inactivate catalogs that should no longer be available to users.
To learn more about how to use procurement catalogs in Supply Chain Management, watch this video.