Sourcing and Procurement Operations integration with Employee Center

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated February 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Procurement Service Management integration with Employee Center

    The integration of Procurement Service Management with Employee Center enhances the user experience for employees, shoppers, and requesters by providing a unified portal to manage procurement activities. This integration allows users to view case types, access knowledge articles, monitor tasks, track requests, and manage purchases all in one place, improving efficiency and visibility.

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    Key Features

    • Access to Procurement Information: Users can view subtopics like Invoices, Supplier Services, Corporate Cards, Purchase Requests, and Travel and Expenses, each containing relevant catalog items and knowledge articles.
    • Task Management: Approvers can manage their approval tasks, while employees and shoppers can complete procurement tasks. Admins can configure to-do widgets to enhance task visibility.
    • Active Items Overview: Shoppers can track tasks, purchases, and requests, with direct links to detailed pages for further action.
    • Request Tracking: Users can track the progress of their procurement requests, approve or clarify requisitions, and provide additional information as needed.
    • Document Management: Users can upload documents, sign agreements via DocuSign, and complete forms directly from Employee Center.
    • Virtual Agent Assistance: The Virtual Agent facilitates product searches and helps manage procurement tasks, enhancing user support.

    Key Outcomes

    This integration streamlines procurement processes, enabling users to efficiently manage their tasks and requests. As a result, customers can expect improved responsiveness from procurement teams, better visibility of their purchasing activities, and a more cohesive experience when interacting with procurement services. This ultimately leads to more effective decision-making and resource management within their organization.

    As an employee, shopper, or requester, you can view all procurement case types available to you, knowledge articles, open to-dos and purchasing tasks assigned to you, track your requests, and even access your purchases on the Employee Center (EC) portal by integrating Sourcing and Procurement Operations with Employee Center.

    Ensure that your admin has installed Employee Center, which is available as a zBoot plugin, for you to enjoy the seamless unified employee portal experience. Further, they may choose to install the employee content taxonomy plugin to access a prebuilt taxonomy for your service catalog, including the Purchases and Expenses topic.

    Note:
    To know more about EC and how to set it up as an admin, visit the Employee Center home page.

    Purchase and expense

    You can view the following subtopics from the Purchase and Expense tab:
    • Invoices
    • Supplier Services
    • Corporate Cards
    • Purchase Requests
    • Travel and Expenses

    Each subtopic includes both catalog items and knowledge articles. Procurement Service Management’s applications pre-populate some of these subtopics with content.

    Select Browse all to view all the above subtopics across categories. These include invoices, supplier services, third-party supplier sites, catalog and off-catalog products and services, knowledge base articles, travel and expenses, and so on. You can set filters and avail the sorting options to refine your search results.
    Note:
    These subtopics are configured by the admin from the Employee taxonomy, where the search items are mapped to relevant connected content.

    From Purchase Requests in particular, you can do a bunch of things that include editing, canceling, or returning a purchase, buying something, requesting for a product or service, submitting a quote, requesting a copy of a contract, asking any queries to the procurement team, understanding what a sourcing request or purchase order is, and so on.

    From Quick links, you can directly go to the list of third-party supplier sites, or visit ShoppingHub.

    My tasks

    As an approver, you can view your open and completed approval tasks, and also work on your open items, from My tasks. If you’re logged in as an employee or shopper instead, you can work on completing your procurement tasks.

    Note:
    Admins can create new to-do widgets to show up in Employee Center, or configure existing widgets from Employee Center > Activity Configurations. For more information, see Employee tasks page.
    In My tasks, you can filter your search by the following:
    • Task type
      • Approval
      • Invoice
      • Milestone
      • Receipt
      • Sourcing
    • Due date
      • Overdue
      • Due soon: Tasks that are due in the next seven days.
    • Priority
      • Critical
      • High
      • Medium
      • Low
    • Created: Tasks that are created within the last four hours.
    Note:
    These filters are inactive by default. You can enable them by navigating to All > Employee Center > Administration > To-do filter categories.

    For detailed information on how to work with configurable task filters, see Configurable task filters.

    My active items

    As a shopper, you can view specific items from the widgets under the My active items section. Some of these are:
    • Tasks: List of open tasks assigned to you, along with reminders on their statuses. You can update the fields to be displayed in the task cards by adding them to the to-dos configuration record.
    • Purchases: Number of purchases made by you.
    • Requests: Number of requests raised by you.
    Others include surveys, invoices, purchase orders, risk assessments, issues, shipments, and so on. Selecting these takes you to their details page on ShoppingHub, where you can work with them as required.
    Note:
    Admins can also configure these active items widgets in Employee Center. For more information, see My active items widget configuration.