Sourcing and Procurement Operations release notes

The ServiceNow® Sourcing and Procurement Operations application provides your employees with a simple automated tool that they can use to shop for goods and services that they need at work. Sourcing and Procurement Operations was enhanced and updated in the Washington DC release.

Sourcing and Procurement Operations highlights for the Washington DC release

• Manage a catalog of goods and services that your employees can use to order items that they need for their jobs.
• Simplify and streamline the way employees request help in sourcing or procuring goods and services.
• Provide transparency into the procurement process with regular updates.
• Automate the end-to-end procurement process workflows, from sourcing through requisitioning, to order fulfillment, receipt, and payment.
• Enable Procurement Specialists to source, negotiate, procure goods and services for an organization, and work on procurement tasks.

See Sourcing and Procurement Operations for more information.

Important:

Sourcing and Procurement Operations is available in the ServiceNow Store. For details, see the "Activation information" section of these release notes.

New in the Washington DC release

Help Center

Introduced in-product assistance, also known as Help Center, for the landing, list, and analytics pages of Source-to-Pay Workspace.​ Select the Help Center icon on these pages to view the content. This feature enables you to access the information directly from within your workspace.

Introduced a new application that provides integration experience between two ServiceNow products, Source-to-Pay Operations and Contract Management Pro, to support adhoc contract request initiation within the sourcing and purchasing workflows. Once a contract request is initiated, the contract workflows are kicked off, leveraging Contract Management Pro's capabilities. Customers entitled to both Source-to-Pay Operations (or Sourcing and Procurement Operations) and Contract Management Pro will get the option to install this integration application.

Changed in this release

Sourcing and Procurement Operations integration with Project Management

Implemented content changes to the intake form that an employee or requester fills in with project details to be captured in the integration experience with the Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) product.

Note:

These project questions are only available on the intake form if the employee or requester has access to SPM. There’s no impact on existing customers.

Complete sourcing checkout

Implemented content changes within the sourcing checkout form for items without pricing in the Shopping Hub product catalog to align with the same intake questions in the off-catalog experience in Employee Center. Existing customers using both Shopping Hub and Employee Center see an alignment of questions in both experiences.

As a requester, provide the contact details of a supplier that you’re interested in working with during intake of catalog items where pricing is needed. A supplier contact record is stored and created for procurement fulfillers to use when reviewing sourcing or purchasing details. Both existing and new customers see these changes.

Requesting for products or services that you don't see on ShoppingHub

Modified the intake form experience for requesters or employees requesting for multiple goods or services, or both, from Employee Center. These include the "I need a good" and "I need a service" intake forms or record producers.

Additionally, there’s a new summary page within Employee Center to confirm the submission and item details. If existing customers take this new feature, they must apply the modified record producer payload to capture multiple goods or services, or both.

Changes were made to the default intake form to enable each good or service, or both, to have the same or different delivery or service address, and dates. Existing customers can apply this experience to their own intake forms with their own questions.

Sourcing and Procurement Operations integration with third-party sourcing solutions

Implemented an additional ability within the integration framework for third-party sourcing tools to know when to close bids now, before the bids end date. In addition, if a supplier award has been made in a third-party sourcing tool, the award response would return to ServiceNow.

Note:

Currently, only a single supplier response can be returned to ServiceNow.

Default email content and in-product alert messages are implemented to inform the employee or requester and the sourcing manager or fulfiller when a Request for Quote (RFQ) has been created in the third-party sourcing tool, and when a supplier award can be made in ServiceNow.

Existing customers are additionally impacted by a consolidation of decision tables used to trigger the third-party sourcing tool integration. While one is deprecated, another is active and in use. Existing customers must ensure that they use the active decision table only.

Customers with the entire Source-to-Pay (S2P) product suite, or any of the individual products within the S2P suite, now share the same workspace, where content within the workspace is role-based. Fulfillers see multiple or single landing pages, and have access to different lists based on their roles. Existing customers who built their own workspace landing pages for SPO, SLO, or APO will see their landing pages within the single workspace.

A new related list tab for emails is now available to capture all business correspondence done over emails. This tab will display both sent and draft emails.

Simplified the purchase line form for fulfillers to view contextual details within the sourcing and negotiation workflows, and the purchasing workflows. Existing customers will see a change in their form layout in both workspace and Platform views.

Simplified the sourcing request form for fulfillers to easily navigate and discover fields that matter, to make sourcing decisions. Existing customers will see a change in their form layout in both workspace and Platform views.

Enhanced the usability such that a fulfiller can now create a case with just one click from the Source-to-Pay Workspace.

Simplified the case form for fulfillers to view only relevant fields. These will be rendered automatically depending on the type of the record. For example, if a related purchase requisition is populated, then the fulfiller will see the Order dependent on case field, and not the Sourcing decision dependent on case and Qualification dependent on case fields. Similarly, fields like Created date will no longer be visible because they are not adding any value to the case form and are just making it crowded.

Create a procurement task

As fulfillers, you can create procurement tasks with specific actions types from the Source-to-Pay Workspace pages, and assign them to employees or shoppers. The supported action types are Submit a form, Sign a document, and Upload a document. This helps shoppers understand what is expected of them to complete the tasks. There’s no impact on existing customers for tasks that are already created, and these new changes are effected with the upgrade.

Shopper to-dos

As shoppers, you can see tasks such as Submit a form, Sign a document, and Upload a document in your to-do list in Shopping Hub.

Sourcing and Procurement Operations integration with Employee Center

As employees, you can see tasks such as Submit a form, Sign a document, and Upload a document in your task page in Employee Center. You can also view the completed tasks in the Completed tab in your task page in Employee Center.

Order a product with quick checkout

As requesters or employees, you can submit a request to purchase a good or service with a past date within the intake form experience. These requests continue to be marked as after-the-fact purchases. Existing customers see the past date validation removed from the intake forms, so past dates are captured and passed to the database as valid responses.

Shoppers can now navigate to punchout supplier sites from Shopping Hub or Employee Center and make purchases from external sites. Level 1 cXML-based punchout is now supported. A separate link is available for navigating to third-party supplier sites. A new widget page that lists out all third-party punchout supplier sites is also available.

Introduced back-end workflows, interface tables, and logic to support Level 1 cXML protocol based punchout to third-party supplier sites.

Shoppers can now view and make single supplier internal bundle purchases from Shopping Hub. Introduced back-end workflows and logic to support these single supplier internal bundle purchases.

Using ShoppingHub

Implemented additional user experience analytics for Shopping Hub to track user sessions, page activity, and navigation within My Purchases, to better understand product usage and user experience. Existing and new customers with the user experience application can see this event tracking to understand their users' Shopping Hub usage.

Sourcing and Purchasing Automation

Addressed a workflow compliance issue where the state within the sourcing and purchasing workflows could be changed manually, bypassing automation, thus causing downstream workflow and usability issues. The State field is made read-only, so that the state flow can adhere to the designed workflow and automation. Existing customers can no longer change the state manually for sourcing request, purchase lines, negotiation event, negotiation, and purchase requisition tables.

Spendint API

Enhanced the common integration framework to include:

• Inbound tables for purchase order, receipt, and cost allocations, which when populated create purchase orders, receipts, and cost allocations in the Sourcing and Procurement Operations tables.
• Scheduled jobs primary flow, which can be used by partners to develop jobs to fetch the data from ERP systems.
• Common error handling framework, which can be used as a standard framework for integrating with any ERPs.

Note:

There’s no impact on existing customers and these changes come in effect only with this upgrade.

As fulfillers, view the integration error tasks that are being generated as part of the new integration framework structure.

Components installed with Sourcing and Procurement Operations

Provide alignment between all Source-to-Pay (S2P) products and expose more commonly used data points to the end user by rescoping the Supplier field to the Service Task (sn_spend_sdc_service_task) table. With this, all tables extending the Service Task table can pull in the Supplier field for a better task experience. If you're an existing customer, you can see the Supplier field deprecated from the Supplier Task table and made available in the Service Task table through a fixed script.

Common Service Delivery

Introduced new actions and user pages to support Supplier Lifecycle Operations task management features.

Deprecations

Starting with the Washington DC release, classic ShoppingHub [com.snc.sn_shop] is being prepared for future deprecation. If you’re an existing customer who has upgraded, you may choose to continue with the existing ShoppingHub plugin and skip Shopping Hub [com.snc.sn_spend_uib]. However, for the UI Builder (UIB) experience, you must install the Shopping Hub plugin. Remember that you can't go back to the existing ShoppingHub plugin after you’ve installed this Shopping Hub plugin.

Supplier risk assessment and supplier tiering assessment cases have been retired and replaced by the due diligence case, to follow the new Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) data model changes.

Activation information

Install Sourcing and Procurement Operations by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store. Visit the ServiceNow Store website to view all the available apps and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.