Sourcing and Procurement Operations integration with Employee Center

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 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. It enables users to access procurement case types, knowledge articles, to-dos, purchasing tasks, and track their requests and purchases directly through the Employee Center portal. This seamless experience requires the Employee Center installed as a zBoot plugin and optionally the employee content taxonomy plugin for prebuilt service catalog taxonomy.

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    Key Features

    • Purchase and Expense Tab: Users can access subtopics such as Invoices, Supplier Services, Corporate Cards, Purchase Requests, and Travel and Expenses, each containing catalog items and knowledge articles. Filters and sorting options help refine searches. Admins configure these topics through Employee taxonomy.
    • Purchase Requests: Users can edit, cancel, return purchases, submit quotes, request contracts, ask procurement queries, and understand sourcing requests or purchase orders. Quick links provide direct access to third-party supplier sites and ShoppingHub.
    • My Tasks: Approvers can view and work on approval tasks, while employees and shoppers can complete procurement tasks. Task filters for type, due date, priority, and creation time are configurable but inactive by default.
    • My Active Items: Shoppers see widgets showing open tasks, purchases, requests, invoices, purchase orders, risk assessments, issues, and shipments. Selecting these widgets leads to detailed pages on ShoppingHub. Admins can configure these widgets.
    • Search for Punchout Products: Users can search for punchout products using the AI search bar within Employee Center.
    • Request Tracking and Actions: Shoppers gain full visibility into procurement request progress and can approve, reject, or request clarifications directly. They can provide additional purchase details, confirm milestone completions, acknowledge service receipts, confirm receipt of ordered items (partial or full), and complete tasks such as viewing links/videos, uploading documents, signing documents (including DocuSign), and filling forms—all within Employee Center.
    • General Inquiries: Shoppers can raise inquiries about existing purchases or general procurement questions.
    • Virtual Agent Support: The ServiceNow Virtual Agent enhances user experience by assisting shoppers in finding and purchasing products from vendors on ShoppingHub, viewing procurement tasks and cases, and obtaining help from the procurement team.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Streamlined User Experience: Employees and shoppers have a consolidated portal to manage procurement activities, reducing the need to navigate multiple systems.
    • Improved Task and Request Management: Approvers and shoppers can efficiently handle approvals, provide information, and track orders, enhancing procurement cycle transparency and speed.
    • Configurable and Extensible: Admins can customize taxonomy, task filters, and active item widgets to tailor the portal to organizational needs.
    • Enhanced Communication: Direct interaction with procurement specialists through tasks like document uploads and form submissions ensures precise requirements and faster resolution.
    • AI-powered Search and Virtual Agent: Users benefit from intelligent search and chatbot assistance, simplifying product discovery and procurement support.

    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.