|
|
Punchout and E-Procurement Integration
|
|
Scientific & Chemical (SciChem) Ltd
- Leading Supplier of Equipment to Laboratories and Schools
- 4 locations in England, Scotland and Ireland
- Selling 20,000+ Items Online
- Established over 50 years
Commercial Challenges?
- With many public sector clients an effective online solution was needed to satisfy their online purchasing requirements.
- SciChem already had an online solution for purchasing their products but this did not accommodate the emerging requirements of their customer base.
- A number of customers were already using marketplaces such as @UK to control their purchasing, it had become essential for SciChem to have a presence on these portals in order to win new business and retain existing clients.
- Away from the public sector clients the larger business clients who were not using any marketplace were starting to request e-procurement controls to ensure their staff’s purchasing was controllable and did not exceed departmental budgets.
|
|
|
want to talk to us?
0845 222 0350
international
+44 (0)163 981 6130
|
|
Technical Challenge
- Complex and large quantity of catalogue products falling into many different top level categories not suited to typical web navigation, previous site relied on searching as the primary means of navigating to products.
- Integration with Group’s finance system to deliver accurate contract pricing to clients that could be centrally controlled.
- Site serving schools, businesses and local authorities.
- Live stock availabilities required for certain clients
- Complex client pricing / discount structures
- Multiple product catalogues.
- Creation of a second news and seminar/events site in parallel with the primary site.
|
|
How we did it
SciChem had been looking to update their existing website and came to Netalogue because of it’s expertise in e-procurement from the buyers perspective in addition to its experise in sellside websites. The unique combination of both skill sets made Netalogue the perfect choice for the upgrade contract due to e-procurement and punchout being top of Scichem’s requirements list.
|
|
Unique Features
|
- Comprehensive search
- Multiple product catalogues enabled/disabled depending on type of customer.
- Ability to restrict the purchase of hazardous materials from customers who had not been vetted.
- Ability to allow the browsing of products by unregistered prospective clients prior to registration.
- An account application process that would allow the manual vetting of customers prior to them
being able to purchase products.
- A comprehensive web back office allowing the quick and simple management of accounts and
the Approval/Rejection of new applications.
|
|
E-Procurement Features
|
- Compatibility with the @UK marketplace was a key factor for some of SciChem’s customer base.
- With a potentially huge audience of new prospective clients using the @UK portal this was also a key factor for SciChem
- Users of @UK are able to select SciChem from the list of suppliers and then through use of XML the @UK portal initiates SciChem’s standard website by passing in the identity of the user and bypassing the standard website security controls.
- An order can be built in the normal way with the essential difference being that on checkout the details of the order are passed back to @UK where they may be amalgamated with orders to other suppliers before being approved and an order being generated to SciChem.
- With the growing number of portals and marketplaces in use by different public sector bodies SciChem will undoubtedly need to integrate with others in the future. For this reason it was important that one centrally maintained site would be capable of supporting all these strategies without having to manually create different export files for different customers.
- For customers not using a procurement portal or marketplace but still wishing to control their purchasing the SciChem site also needed to directly support e-procurement.
- SciChem’s e-procurement module enables the configuration of departments, buyers within those departments, departmental budgets, order limits, address book control, assignment of roles to users, restriction of items that can be purchased, copying of order notifications to budget controllers, configuration of self approve expenditure limits, assignment of approvers for higher levels of expenditure, order approval/rejection control, buyer/approver/supplier messaging centre and many other powerful features that today’s switched on clients have started to demand.
|
|
Hosting
|
- With a dependence on punchout and portal integration it was important to ensure the hosting package would support current and future requirements.
- With Netalogue’s servers located on the internet backbone we can quickly add additional capacity as and when it is required, with our excellent shared hosting package we were able to offer SciChem an extremely cost effective route to servicing current online customers.
- Specialist XML services were added to the standard hosting configuration to ensure current and future integration requirements were taken care of with inbound/outbound XML communication streams to and from SciChem’s clients.
|
|
After Sales Support
|
- In a fast moving sector with rapidly changing challenges it was important for SciChem to have total confidence in the support offered by their web site provider
- SciChem have direct access to their dedicated account manager as well as direct telephone, email and extranet access to the programmers and technical support personnel at Netalogue, around the clock.
- With an average response time of 4 minutes SciChem have been able to rest assured that any technical issue is dealt with in the fastest possible time.
|
|
Maintenance
|
- The internet is a fast moving and continually changing environment in which to trade especially when keeping pace with the purchasing requirements of the public sector and Educational customers. Being heavily involved in the e-procurement sector Netalogue continually monitor what is evolving so that SciChem can add the necessary integration capabilities to their site in readiness.
- Through regular teleconference calls and face to face meetings Netalogue explain and demonstrate the latest features that would benefit SciChem’s clients and online operation.
- Any new desirable features are quickly implemented in a secure development area for trial and testing before being release to the live server.
- Updates to the site are performed seamlessly, usually out of hours with absolutely no downtime to the site and no inconvenience to SciChem’s customers.
|
|
What's Next
Since upgrading their website to the Netalogue solution SciChem’s online sales have experienced a massive 70% growth. The web is quickly becoming a core element of SciChem’s business and further integration with the internal systems and processes will yield further benefits through reducing the bottom line costs of sale. Netalogue are extremely pleased to have been able to assist SciChem in exceeding their expectations and delivering instant and measurable benefits.
|
|
|
|