eProcureAI / Platform / Catalog
CatalogProducts and services sit in one place at the price you negotiated. Requesters choose, the line total appears, and the purchase order that follows carries the same figure.
This is the real screen. Twenty products and six services, priced by rate and unit.
Nobody argues with a catalog. That is what makes it the most effective control most procurement teams have, and the one they set up last.
The alternative is free text. Somebody types what they think they need, a buyer interprets it, and the price gets looked up from an email thread that may or may not still be accurate. Every step there is a chance to get it wrong.
With a catalog the requester picks. The rate comes with the item, the line total works itself out, and the figure that reaches the approver is the figure the supplier has agreed to honour.
Most catalogs stop at physical goods, which leaves services as the messy half. In eProcureAI a service carries a rate and a unit, so IT setup and configuration is eighty five dollars an hour and a quarterly deep clean is three hundred and fifty a visit. A services request produces a priced line rather than a paragraph somebody has to cost up later.
Each service also carries a short note about when to use it, which sounds trivial until you watch somebody choose between installation and maintenance for the first time.
When buying correctly is the fastest option available, people stop working around it. Catalog items under your threshold can clear with no approval at all, which is usually the single change that moves on catalog spend from around sixty percent to the nineties.
Start with the fifty or so items that account for most of your requests. A thin catalog is the main reason people go around one.
Each one gets a rate, a unit and a short note on when to use it. This is the part most companies skip and later wish they had not.
Below a figure you choose, catalog items simply go through. This is what makes the compliant path the quick one.
Price changes are submitted by the supplier and approved by you, with an effective date, so the catalog does not quietly drift.
Hardware, peripherals and supplies at the rate you negotiated. The requester picks a quantity and the line total appears without anybody looking anything up.
A rate and a unit turn a vague ask into a number. Twelve hours of IT setup is a priced line, not a request for somebody to work out what it should cost.
Blocking off catalog buying pushes spend onto personal cards, where you can see none of it. Off catalog requests route for review instead, so the exception is visible rather than invisible.
Short on purpose. A catalog people can load in an afternoon beats a perfect one that never launches.
| Field | Products | Services | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Name | Yes | Yes | What the requester searches for |
| Category | Yes | Yes | Keeps a growing list navigable and drives reporting |
| Rate | Per item | Per unit | The figure that flows onto the order |
| Unit | Each | Hour, day or visit | Turns a service into a priced line |
| Typical use | Optional | Yes | Stops people choosing the wrong service |
| Supplier | Yes | Yes | Determines who the purchase order goes to |
| Effective date | Yes | Yes | Lets a price change land on a date rather than immediately |
Requests already approved keep the rate they were approved at, so a price change never rewrites history.
Suppliers propose updates through their portal and your team approves them with an effective date. No quarterly spreadsheet exchange that is stale on arrival.
A new rate can be set to start on the first of next month, so mid month requests are not repriced underneath people.
An approved request keeps the rate it was approved at. The catalog changing does not quietly change what somebody already agreed to.
Grouping by category is what keeps a catalog of a few hundred lines searchable rather than a wall of text.
Items nobody picks are dead weight and items repeatedly requested off catalog are the ones to add next.
Catalogs load from a spreadsheet, which is why most companies go from nothing to working in a single afternoon.
A catalog only works if it is quicker than asking somebody, which is the bar we designed it to clear.
Choose from a list and get on with the day. That is genuinely the whole interaction for a requester.
Holds the rates, does the arithmetic, and carries the same figures onto the order.
Bring a price list and we will import it live, then raise a request against it so you can see the whole path.
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