Sourcing and Procurement Operations integration with Employee Center

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Sourcing and Procurement Operations integration with Employee Center

    Integrating Sourcing and Procurement Operations with Employee Center (EC) enables employees, shoppers, and requesters to access procurement case types, knowledge articles, to-dos, purchasing tasks, and track requests via a unified portal. This integration requires Employee Center to be installed as a zBoot plugin, with optional employee content taxonomy plugins to utilize prebuilt service catalog taxonomies such as Purchases and Expenses.

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    Key Features

    • Purchase and Expense Tab: Users can view subtopics including invoices, supplier services, corporate cards, purchase requests, and travel and expenses. Each contains catalog items and knowledge articles. Admins configure these using Employee taxonomy to connect related content.
    • Purchase Requests: Allows editing, canceling, returning purchases, submitting quotes, requesting contracts, and querying procurement teams directly within EC.
    • My Tasks: Approvers can manage approval tasks, and employees can complete procurement tasks. Task filtering options include types, due dates, and priorities, configurable by admins.
    • My Active Items: Shoppers see open tasks, purchases, requests, surveys, invoices, and other procurement-related items, with links to ShoppingHub for details and actions. Admins can customize these widgets.
    • Search Capabilities: AI-powered search within EC enables direct searching for punchout products.
    • Procurement Request Tracking: Full visibility into request progress with capabilities to approve, reject, or request clarifications on requisitions and sourcing requests directly from EC.
    • Task Completion in EC: Users can respond to follow-up questions, confirm service milestones and receipt of goods, view assigned links or videos, upload documents, sign documents (including via DocuSign), complete forms, and raise general procurement inquiries—all within EC.
    • Virtual Agent Integration: The Virtual Agent assists shoppers in finding and purchasing products, viewing procurement information, and interacting with the procurement team from within EC.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Provides a seamless, unified employee experience for procurement activities through Employee Center.
    • Enhances transparency and control over procurement requests and approvals.
    • Enables efficient task management with customizable filters and widgets tailored by admins.
    • Simplifies communication and documentation processes related to procurement tasks.
    • Improves productivity by integrating AI search and Virtual Agent support directly within the employee portal.
    • Supports better collaboration between procurement specialists and employees through direct task actions in EC.

    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.