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

    This integration enables employees, shoppers, and requesters to access all procurement case types, knowledge articles, to-dos, and purchasing tasks directly through the ServiceNow Employee Center (EC) portal. It provides a unified, seamless experience for managing procurement activities, tracking requests, and viewing purchases in one centralized location. To use this integration, administrators must install the Employee Center (available as a zBoot plugin) and optionally the employee content taxonomy plugin for predefined service catalog taxonomy including Purchases and Expenses topics.

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    Key Features

    • Purchase and Expense Tab: Allows users to browse subtopics such as invoices, supplier services, corporate cards, purchase requests, and travel and expenses—all populated with catalog items and knowledge articles relevant to procurement.
    • Procurement Case Management: Users can create, edit, cancel, or return purchases; request products or services; submit quotes; inquire about contracts; and communicate with the procurement team.
    • My Tasks: Approvers can view and act on open and completed approval tasks, while employees or shoppers can complete assigned procurement tasks. Tasks can be filtered by type, priority, due date, and creation time, with filters configurable by admins.
    • My Active Items: Displays task lists, purchase counts, requests, surveys, invoices, purchase orders, and other procurement-related items. Selecting an item navigates users to detailed views on ShoppingHub.
    • Search and Tracking: Users can search for punchout products using AI-powered search within Employee Center and track procurement case progress with full visibility into request statuses.
    • Direct Actions from Employee Center: Users can approve or reject purchase requisitions, provide additional purchase details, confirm milestones and receipts, view or upload documents, sign documents electronically (including DocuSign), complete forms, and raise general procurement inquiries—all without leaving Employee Center.
    • Virtual Agent Support: The ServiceNow Virtual Agent integrated with Sourcing and Procurement Operations helps shoppers find products, manage purchases and tasks, track cases, and get procurement team assistance via conversational interactions within Employee Center.

    What to Expect

    By integrating Sourcing and Procurement Operations with Employee Center, organizations provide employees and approvers with a single portal experience to efficiently manage procurement workflows, approvals, and related tasks. This integration enhances transparency and collaboration by consolidating procurement information, enabling quick access to knowledge and case statuses, and facilitating direct task completion. Administrators can customize task widgets, filters, and active item displays to fit organizational needs, ensuring the portal remains aligned with user roles and responsibilities.

    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.