How to “Punch Out” the Competition
Posted by Margaret Dawson on September 8, 2009
If you’re relatively new to the world of business integration or if you’ve primarily been focused on technologies like EDI, you may have heard the term “punch out” and wondered what it means. From a general perspective, punch out carries a variety of meanings, from ”punching out” a time clock at work to the punch-out of data on a computer to bailing out of an airplane. But with integration, punchout refers to a specific process related to eCommerce, where a user “punches out” from an eProcurement system to an eStore.
This is important because many buying organizations have spent vast sums to automate their internal procurement process in order to reduce costs, ensure centralized control and increase efficiencies. Typically, corporate buyers use an eProcurement system to access internally hosted catalogs and add items to a requisition before submitting it for approval to their manager. Once approved, the purchase order is sent to the vendor electronically. In this way, companies are able to take advantage of business rules and workflow to ensure that employees buy approved items at agreed upon prices.
However, it is not always possible or practical for companies to host all supplier catalogs within their own procurement system, which means that for some products, employees need to purchase from eCommerce stores or online catalogs hosted by the vendors or suppliers. This may be because pricing is relatively volatile or because the supplier has specialized tools like product configurators on their website. The key is making this shopping experience easy without losing control of the procurement process or business rules.
That’s where punch out comes in. With the right technology, punchout can be a seamless experience for IT and the endusers, while keeping centralized control of procurement and working with the internal workflow and purchase order/invoicing processes.
Hubspan Punch Out allows suppliers to provide automatic connections between their online store and the various existing eProcurement systems, such as Ariba, Oracle, Peoplesoft, SAP, and many others, used by their customers. Those seamless connections require interoperability between a large variety of systems and technologies, and Hubspan mediates between different transport protocols, applications, data formats and standards, as well as handling disparate security policies, business rules or work flows.
Read the Punch Out DataSheet for more information.
Hubspan’s Punch Out solution dramatically reduces the cost and complexity associated with traditional integration approaches by allowing suppliers to enable punchout for all their customers via a single connection to the Hubspan integration platform. In addition, neither suppliers nor their customers have to make changes to their systems or business processes in to support incompatibilities.
Hubspan provides you with the following advantages:
- Makes it easy for customers to purchase from your online store/eCatalog, increasing customer loyalty and revenues
- Integrates with legacy eProcurement systems, while supporting all major standards and protocols
- Controls costs through the Software as a Service (SaaS) pricing model and ability to start small and scale as needed
- Deploys quickly with a fast time to value and easy customer on-boarding
So, if you need to enable your customers to connect to your online store or catalog from within their eProcurement system, and you want to do so in the most efficient and effective way possible, Hubspan’s Punch Out solution may be a great option for you.
Tags: Ariba, customer integration, demand chain, e-procurement, Oracle, Peoplesoft, punchout, SaaS, SAP
[...] of an eStore operation usually includes tight coupling with a buyer’s procurement system via PunchOut to fit into the buyer’s purchasing model. Also important is integration with the suppliers’ [...]
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