Integration with IP and other 3rd party procurement apps

Question

I don't know about the rest of you, but one of the primary hurdles that we have to get past with target customers is that most of the big ones already have procurement systems that produce POs. Ideally, they'd like to post those POs as either an RFQ/Auction or directly as a PO for a particular supplier. This is particularly true for big manufacturers who initially want to bring their OEM suppliers and contract manufacturers into an on-line procurement environment and then expand that to auctions and RFQs later. The scenario refers primarily to those trading partners that do not have their own back-end systems and EAI solutions.
We think we have come up with a workaround by taking the EDI produced out of the buyer's system into our Hub, transforming it into our cannonical form, then turning the data into an OEX OAG XML auction document, uploading it through a dummy account for that buyer, once the bid is placed by the supplier, automatically accepting, and generating a final PO as a PO Akn back to the buyer's system. It is a little hokey, but it is the best we've been able come up with. (Of course, once the PO message from the buyer's system is sent, the buyer wants nothing to do with it after that. They just want to receive a PO Akn back).
Any ideas?
David Luper
[email protected]
415-325-5028

Answer 1

David,
It sounds like you are hitting on two of our critical issues. Specifically, our issues are the following:
1. We have customers with existing procurement systems containing requisitioning/workflow/approval functionality. They want to continue using this functionality while using our Exchange for sourcing/bidding/tabulation/etc. This gives us the requirement for integration to these procurement systems (iP, SAP, Peoplesoft, etc). We need the ability to load to the Exchange all the parameters for an Auction (open date, close date, type of auction, etc), line items, and potentially even suppliers. We envision that this document load generated from the requisition system could even be flagged to open the auction immediately without the buyer ever having to go to the Exchange. The buyer would then go to the Exchange to see bids and to do the award process. Once the bid was awarded, this would generate a document back to the requisition system for issuance of a PO by the procurement system.
Our second issue is the ability to simply issue a manual PO. This could be done within the Exchange and/or a procurement system. Right now we are missing significant transaction volume due to the inability for a buyer to go issue a direct PO to a vendor on the Exchange without going through the auction or catalog process. If the goods the buyer wants to buy are under their threshold for required bidding and are not in the catalog, they go around the Exchange with a paper PO. This eliminates all the benefits of integration and our chance to charge for this transaction
Both of these issues are extremely critical for us. Dee, what can you tell us about the integration capabilities with procurement/requisition systems or the manual PO functionality? We have heard multiple conflicting reports about the availability of integration with iP.
Thanks!
John Alexander
Way2Bid
[EMAIL][email protected][EMAIL]
417.447.5042 (Voice)