Sourcing and Procurement Operations integration with Employee Center

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Sourcing and Procurement Operations integration with Employee Center

    The integration of Sourcing and Procurement Operations with Employee Center (EC) provides employees, shoppers, and requesters a unified portal to manage procurement activities efficiently. By accessing Employee Center, users can view procurement case types, knowledge articles, open to-dos, purchasing tasks, and track requests and purchases in one place. This seamless experience requires Employee Center installed as a zBoot plugin, with an optional employee content taxonomy plugin to organize service catalog content.

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    Key Features

    • Purchase and Expense Management: Users can explore subtopics like Invoices, Supplier Services, Corporate Cards, Purchase Requests, and Travel and Expenses, each populated with catalog items and knowledge articles. The Purchase Requests section allows editing, canceling, returning purchases, submitting quotes, requesting contracts, and asking procurement queries.
    • My Tasks: Approvers and employees can view and act on approval tasks and procurement tasks. Tasks can be filtered by type, due date, priority, and creation time, with filters configurable by admins.
    • My Active Items: Shoppers can see open tasks, number of purchases, requests, surveys, invoices, purchase orders, and other procurement-related items. Selecting these items leads to detailed pages on ShoppingHub for further action.
    • Search and Interaction: Users can search punchout products directly using an AI-enhanced search bar in Employee Center.
    • Tracking and Approvals: Shoppers have full visibility into their procurement requests and can approve, reject, or request clarifications on purchase requisitions and sourcing requests directly in Employee Center.
    • Task Completion and Communication: Users can provide additional purchase details, confirm service milestones or receipt of orders, upload documents, sign documents (including via DocuSign), complete forms, and view assigned links or videos—all within Employee Center.
    • Inquiry and Support: Shoppers can raise general procurement inquiries and obtain assistance through the ServiceNow Virtual Agent integrated into Employee Center, which supports product searches, task management, case tracking, and communication with procurement teams.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Streamlines procurement processes by consolidating tasks, requests, and approvals into a single employee-facing portal.
    • Enhances user experience with easy access to relevant procurement information, tasks, and support resources.
    • Enables administrators to tailor the Employee Center experience through configurable widgets, taxonomies, and filters to meet organizational needs.
    • Improves communication and collaboration between shoppers and procurement specialists via integrated task management and Virtual Agent support.
    • Supports compliance and timely procurement operations by providing milestone confirmations, receipt acknowledgments, and approval workflows within the portal.

    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.