PunchOut product catalogs provide a great experience for both requestors as well as your purchasing department.
PunchOut is a feature that allows access to external supplier managed product catalogs and then brings those ordered items into the Self-Service Procurement Cloud page to create requisitions and trigger subsequent purchasing processes like the approval workflow, etc. The external catalog can be hosted by Oracle Exchange (aka. Oracle Supplier Network or OSN), a third-party organization or by the supplier.
Benefits of Using PunchOuts via OSN
PunchOut provides the requester with a simple and elegant Amazon-like shopping cart experience, seamlessly integrated with the requisition process in the application. The burden of legwork in preparing your purchase orders is shifted from your administrative staff to the requester, while the most up-to-date and accurate pricing and discounting terms and other information like supplier item details, etc. get automatically applied.
The OSN is an online service managed by Oracle that provides electronic messaging services. It is open to all Oracle Applications’ customers and their trading partners. One of the other big advantages of using a OSN hosted PunchOut catalog vs. a vendor-hosted one is that the same channel used to submit orders to the vendor can also be used to receive corresponding digital invoices from them as well. These electronic invoices are in predetermined XML formats and can be directly integrated into Payables Cloud application as AP invoice without any missed information. This is of critical consideration as PunchOut orders tend to be bulk orders with multiple invoice lines often going into many pages. Even the alternative approach of using the delivered invoice imaging solution may not give you the 100% hit rate you want and require manual intervention for data fixes.
Refer to the FAQ link below for details on registering in OSN as a buying organization, getting a list of current OSN suppliers, configuring your account, etc.
https://osn.oracle.com/snw/faces/home.jsf#P1
Besides OSN registration, the other application setups required for implementing a PunchOut catalog include – configuring Supplier Context Map Sets, Catalog Category Hierarchy, Context Zones and B2B Configuration (i.e. Trading Partner, Document Type, Channel, Agreement, Supplier Site Assignments).
Using PunchOut via OSN, you’ll get a seamless and near 100% accurate auto generation of AP invoices for bulk orders resulting in improved purchasing and payables staff productivity.
