The employee self-service procurement portal is a tool for employees to easily find products available for self-service procurement and create procurement requests with pre-defined information. If the products you are looking for is not available in the self-service portal, there is a possibility to browse a suppliers web shop to find the right product and add that to the shopping cart.
This is done by using something called punchout catalogs. If available, you can log in to the suppliers web shop, add products to their shopping cart and when you submit the cart, the products will be brought back to the shopping cart in IFS and you can proceed from there.
Note that you could also use the portal to buy products to a specific work task or project activity. Then you should either open the portal from the work task or activity or add the reference in the shopping cart later on in the process.
A self-service catalog must have been created and published with a punchout catalog defined for the supplier.
If you want the procurement to be connected to a work task or project activity, you need to open the portal from the work task or project side.
As a result of this activity lines are added from the suppliers web shop to the self-service shopping cart and you can proceed to submit the purchase request.
If you opened the portal from a work task or project activity, the lines in the shopping cart will get a reference to the respective source.