Sourcing and Procurement Operations integration with Employee Center

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 2 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 a unified portal experience for employees, shoppers, and requesters to manage procurement activities efficiently. This integration enables users to view procurement case types, knowledge articles, assigned tasks, track requests, and access purchase details directly within the Employee Center portal. To utilize this integration, the Employee Center must be installed by your administrator as a zBoot plugin, with optional installation of the employee content taxonomy plugin to organize service catalog content.

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    Key Features

    • Purchase and Expense Tab: Provides access to subtopics such as Invoices, Supplier Services, Corporate Cards, Purchase Requests, and Travel and Expenses, including catalog items and knowledge articles. Users can browse, filter, and sort procurement-related content and perform actions like editing or canceling purchase requests, submitting quotes, or querying the procurement team.
    • My Tasks: Allows approvers to view and act on approval tasks, while employees and shoppers can manage their procurement tasks. Task filtering by type, due date, priority, and creation time can be enabled by administrators for refined task management.
    • My Active Items: Displays widgets showing open tasks, purchases made, requests raised, and other procurement-related items such as surveys and invoices. These widgets are configurable by administrators to suit organizational needs.
    • Request Tracking and Action: Shoppers gain full visibility into the status of their procurement requests and can take actions such as approving requisitions, providing additional purchase details, confirming milestones, acknowledging receipts, uploading documents, signing forms, and raising inquiries—all within Employee Center.
    • Virtual Agent Support: The Virtual Agent integrated with Employee Center assists shoppers in quickly finding products on Shopping Hub, managing procurement tasks, and interacting with the procurement team for support.

    Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Streamlined Procurement Experience: Employees can manage procurement requests, approvals, and related tasks seamlessly in one portal, reducing manual follow-ups and improving process transparency.
    • Enhanced Visibility and Control: Real-time tracking of purchase requests and tasks empowers users to stay informed and take timely actions, improving procurement cycle efficiency.
    • Configurable User Interface: Administrators can tailor widgets, task filters, and taxonomy to align with organizational processes, ensuring relevance and ease of use.
    • Improved Collaboration: Built-in capabilities to ask procurement questions, submit documents, and sign forms facilitate smoother communication between shoppers and procurement specialists.
    • Self-Service and Automation: Virtual Agent integration simplifies product search and task management, driving faster resolution and reducing reliance on manual support.

    Next Steps for Customers

    • Ensure Employee Center and optional taxonomy plugins are installed and configured by your ServiceNow admin for full integration functionality.
    • Work with administrators to configure task filters, active items widgets, and taxonomy mappings to optimize the procurement user experience.
    • Leverage Virtual Agent capabilities in Employee Center to enhance shopper support and streamline common procurement interactions.
    • Train employees and approvers on how to use Employee Center to track requests, approve tasks, and manage procurement activities effectively.

    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 Shopping Hub.

    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 Shopping Hub, 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.