The employee self-service procurement solution facilitates for any user to create procurement requests through a guided process that helps the employee find the right products and create accurate requisitions using the right suppliers.
The solution has a back-end part that consists of the Self-service Procurement Catalogs and default settings and a front-end part that consists of the Self-service Procurement Portal and a request history.
The self-service procurement solution can also be used to procure products and services to work orders and projects.
The catalogs are used to define the products and supplier catalogs available for procurement and who should have access to the catalog.
Products are both inventory and non-inventory parts defined in IFS Cloud that has a defined supplier. Supplier for purchase part items from the catalog valid sites can be added to the catalog manually or through an update job based on a separate setting.
The update job will include products based on a setting that is done per supplier. The options (per supplier) are:
You can run the update job for the whole catalog or for a specific supplier and you can start it manually or schedule it to run on a regular basis. The update job has two purposes which is to add new products to the catalog and to keep the catalog information up to date. To be able to support free-text search some information like descriptions and prices are stored in the catalog and needs to be kept up to date with the job. When running the job you can decide to:
If some products should be made unavailable, you need to delete manually added lines, but the automatically added lines should instead be set to excluded. Then they will not be re-added when running the update jobs. If parts are made inactive in some way or removed from a supplier agreement, they will instantly also be removed from all catalogs.
The prices used in the catalog are fetched using the regular pricing logic using a quantity = 1. If price steps are used in the pricing there is an indication in the self-service portal and step prices are considered when adding parts to the shopping cart.
The pictures used in the product cards and product details are fetched using the regular object connection feature for media items. If the object connection transformation is set up correctly, images connected to any of the part records (master part, purchase part and supplier for purchase part) or images directly connected to the catalog line will be displayed. Note that the object connection and object connection transformation set up is added by default, but can be manually changed if needed.
The products are also categorized in an hierarchic structure of categories according to the defined procurement category assortment. When creating category assortment you can map products to the categories either by connecting the part number to the category, the purchase groups or the supplier assortment. The categorization basic data can be adjusted and catalogs updated using the update job.
The self-service procurement solution supports two types of supplier catalogs. A Punchout catalog, which gives the possibility for employees to procure items directly from an external supplier webshop and a Hosted Supplier Catalog, which enables the employees to procure items from a supplier catalog that is stored and maintained in the application.
There is support for two common punchout standards called OCI and cXML. To enable punchout for a supplier in the catalog, you will first need to set up the punchout settings (like the url, user and password) for the supplier in the Supplier/Purchasing/Punchout Settings tab. Note that you can have different punchout settings for the same supplier used in different catalogs. This can be used if some users should have access to more products in the webshop.
The hosted supplier catalogs can be created manually or uploaded from a csv file. You will then need to connect the hosted catalog to one or more self-service catalogs to make them available in the self-service portal. Products from the hosted supplier catalogs are not registered as part numbers in IFS. To be able to find the supplier products in the portal using the navigation through categories, the hosted catalog lines needs to be mapped to the category assortment used in the self-service catalog.
A third option is to allow Free-text requests. This can be enabled per supplier.
A catalog can be valid for one or several sites. Note that the products are added to the catalog per site, so parts, supplier for parts and agreements must exist on the relevant sites for products to be added.
A catalog can be made available for all users, specific users or user groups. The user groups are defined specifically for the self-service solution. If the catalog is set up to be valid for all users or to a group of users, you can also add user or user group exceptions, which means that those users will not have access to the catalog. Note that the user also needs access to one of the valid sites for the catalog to be available in the portal.
The catalog can be in status Planned, Published or Obsolete and only the published catalogs will be available in the portal. You can update both Planned and Published catalogs directly, but if you want a structured process to introduce changes, you can create new revisions of an existing catalog. Make the changes to the planned new revision and when done, publish the new revision, which will then replace the old published revision. The old revision will then be set to obsolete.
When creating a new revision you can decide what you want to copy from the old revision to the new.
The self-service portal is the tool for the employees to easily create procurement requests based on the published catalogs. It is done by, in different ways, adding products and services to a shopping cart, add necessary basic data to the shopping cart and then submit the cart to a purchase or material request.
The portal consists of two tabs, one for the Products defined in the self-service catalog as well as connected hosted supplier catalogs and one for the Suppliers available for free text or punchout purchases.
In the portal there is a basic free text search. The search is only applicable for the products tab and will not have any impact on the suppliers tab. You can combine the search with the regular filters. Note that if you have multiple catalogs available for a user, there is also a possibility to do a free text search cross catalogs.
You can also use the structure of categories to narrow down the list of products shown. The category structure used is defined in the catalog. Products that is not mapped to any category will only be shown on the top level of the category structure. You can go up and down in the structure of categories and you get an indication on where you are in the structure through the bread crumbs.
Note that the portal is site specific and we are only showing available catalogs and products for one site at a time. The user can switch sites through the site context in the upper right corner.
If you are using the card view, it is for performance reasons recommended to only show 24 records at a time in the products tab and use the "Show More" option when needed.
You can add products to a shopping cart from the products tab or from the product detail page. The list of products can be viewed in a card view with images or in a regular list or table. Products that comes from a hosted supplier catalog will be treated as a no part purchase in the shopping cart and later on in the purchase requisition.
In the Suppliers tab, you can see all suppliers available for free-text and/or punchout services. When using the punchout feature, the user is redirected to the suppliers webshop and the shopping cart will then be brought back to the shopping cart in IFS with the information about the products including prices.
When products and services has been added to the shopping cart, the user can complete the information related to the request such as internal destinations, ordered for or pre posting information. It is also possible to specify a specific wanted delivery date, but if you do not specify that the system will calculate the first possible date for delivery.
It is also possible to set up user defaults, so that requisitioner, internal destination or possible pre posting is added to the shopping cart automatically when it is created. This might for instance be used for pre posting of cost centers.
Purchase part and no part lines will always generate purchase requisitions. For inventory parts, there is a supply option with the values inventory or purchase order. If the supply option is inventory order, a regular material requisition will be created and if it is purchase order, a purchase requisition will be generated. Note that the default value will always be Inventory Order.
The user can follow up on previously submitted requests in a history page showing the requests added by the user. Apart from following up the status of the request, it is also possible to trigger a receipt and re-order products from this page.
It is also possible to use the self-service solution to procure products and services to a work order or a project.
You can either initiate the procurement using the portal from respective process i.e. the Work Task page on the work order side and the Activity Materials and Services page on the project side or connect lines in the shopping cart to either a work order work task or a project activity. When initiating the portal from these processes the reference to respective work task or project activity is kept in the portal and all items added to the shopping cart will hold a reference to the source. The pre posting of the shopping cart lines will be inherited from respective source (work task or activity).
When submitting requests connected to a work task, a maintenance purchase requisition will be created on top of the regular requisition for the purchase requests and a maintenance material requisition will be created for the inventory requests.
When submitting requests connected to a project activity, the purchase and material requisitions created will be connected to the project activity just as if they had been manually connected to the project and reporting costs in the same manner. Note that no miscellaneous demands are created on the project side for these requests.
My Self-Service Request History
Self-Service Procurement Portal
Self-Service Procurement Portal - Catalogs
Self-service Procurement Catalog
Define Self-service Procurement Defaults
Enter Purchase Request in Self-service Portal
Manage Employee Self-service Catalog
Manage Hosted Supplier Catalog