Managed Service

High quality, structured data is at the core of effective procure-to-pay and spend analysis. In much the same way that you can’t use crude oil to run your car, data has to go through a refining process to make it suitable to power e-procurement. Our managed catalogue service is our data refinery – suppliers input data of varying quality which we then process to produce the clean fuel for our catalogue engine – or any e-procurement platform.

Like the refining process, a lot of energy, domain knowledge and specialist tools go into the data conversion process. Science Warehouse has developed these over the last 12 years and in that time processed many millions of products across thousands of product categories. The managed catalogue service means that Science Warehouse does all the work of liaising with suppliers for their catalogues, mapping and normalising their data, and making it available for the customer.

At the same time both buyers and suppliers remain in full control of their data so they can track changes and approve them prior to them being made live.

Key benefits of the managed catalogue service include:

• Data is mapped to a uniform classification structure
• Data is normalised to provide consistency across all suppliers
• Data is optimised for performance in the eCatalogue search environment
• Data is enriched to provide the optimal level of information for product selection
• Data is tagged with key indicators such as health & safety information
• Accessible to all suppliers – no matter how large or small

The quality of catalogue data can make or break an e-procurement implementation. It is fundamental to usability, product finding and comparison, transaction routing and monitoring and to spend analysis.

What alternatives are there to a managed catalogue service?

To find out more about how a managed catalogue service can power your e-procurement programme please contact us today. Alternatively further information is available via the links below:

• Catalogue maintenance
• Product data checking 
• Catalogue updating