Do today’s e-procurement catalog management solutions solve the problems stated above?
NO! THEY ACTUALLY CONTRIBUTE TO THE PROBLEM! First, this dual approach creates user interface problems, which contributes greatly to the aforementioned user adoption problems. How? If you have 10 “punchouts” and 30 “local” catalogs, your users must learn to navigate 11 different interfaces (the 10 supplier online catalogs plus the e-procurement search interface for accessing the “local” catalogs) to find what they are looking for! Second, it limits supply options. If a supplier can’t support “punchout” (many can’t), the buyer must find a supplier who can. In this case, the buyer is making a sourcing decision based on a suppliers’ ability to support “punchout” versus price, delivery and service. Or the buyer can wait for the supplier to provide the support for “punchout”. In this second case, they are depriving their users of the supplier catalogs they need to do their jobs, causing users to usually bypass the system. Third, it adds cost to the supplier as well because he is, just like
