Supplier Enabled Content for Better Buyer Supplier Collaboration

65% percent of procurement professionals say procurement at their company is becoming more collaborative with suppliers, according to The Future of Procurement, Making Collaboration Pay Off, by Oxford Economics. That’s why at Basware, we offer “supplier enabled content,” as part of our Marketplace solution, a way for both suppliers and buyers to share the responsibility of updating catalog content, making both the buying and selling process easier and more intuitive.

When we use Amazon, we search using high quality and rich content. If you input “yellow beach towel” in the search bar, chances are high that you’ll see images of various yellow towels and upon clicking, get further detailed descriptions about each of them.

But the “yellow beach towel” content doesn’t just appear out of thin air—it’s provided by the suppliers. And the reason they’re prepared to spend considerable time providing this information is because this content acts as their shop window to the world, catching the eyes and attention of buyers and increasing the likelihood of making a sale.

The Problem: Tedious Content Catalogs

But not all purchasing experiences are as consumer centric as they should be. It’s true that purchase-to-pay (P2P) and ERP solutions have included the ability for buyers to purchase from catalogs. But the problem is that each system is different, making it extremely time consuming and repetitive for suppliers to create different catalog content for each system, especially knowing that it’s only available for a single buyer. And who would blame them? No one wants to do the same task over and over again.

This issue led to buyers creating catalogs on behalf of suppliers. This way at least buyers had relevant content to use for purchases. But it unfortunately also led to poor quality and inaccurate content. So, rather than an Amazon style shopping experience, the requisitioner was effectively buying from an excel spreadsheet. Not exactly a positive user experience. And as a result, maverick spend still occurred.

The Solution: Supplier Enabled Content

When Basware Marketplace was developed, the vision was to build a solution that all suppliers and buyers could use, regardless of their size or complexity. Product Manager is the core product within Marketplace that allows buyers and suppliers to create, manage, and share content. Suppliers can easily manage all their products and services in one place and make them available to multiple buyers, eliminating the need to maintain multiple catalogs. In Basware Product Manager, suppliers load content once and create price lists per buyer compared to other systems. Other solutions fail to separate the product data and the price data, so suppliers are forced to load buyer centric catalogs multiple times, with many of these including the same items.

Basware eliminates the need for this by enabling suppliers to customise the same content for multiple buyers. Then, through Basware Marketplace, buyers can complete their shopping, searching the goods and selecting only from relevant items with accurate pricing.

The net result is that the requisitioner makes a buying decision based on high quality content straight from the supplier, like key words, images, attachments, etc. And for the supplier, the benefits don’t end here.

• Once a buyer invites a supplier to join, there’s no cost for registering or for any activity related to Product Manager

• Only a one-time registration is required for the supplier, regardless of how many other Marketplace customers suppliers provide catalog content for

• Once a supplier is registered for Product Manager, they have access to all buyers in the Basware Network

• Content is easy to build, simple to reuse, and available 24/7, maximising suppliers’ exposure

How does it work?

Many suppliers have a Content Management System (CMS). So, we had a mission to provide tools in Product Manager which allow suppliers to export core data from their CMS, further enhance the data with images, attachments, bundles, etc. and then easily publish the content into Marketplace. And because Product Manager separates pricing from content, suppliers can effectively load their content once and then re-use it across multiple buyers by just manipulating the pricelists. If they update the content, the price lists reflect this immediately. 

Here’s how it works:

1. After logging into Basware Purchase Manager, buyers can click on the link to Product Manager.

2. In Product Manager, buyers create a new Agreement to request content and link to the Supplier.

3. The supplier will get an email alert asking for content.

4. The supplier uploads the content.

5. Once published, the content will be sent to Purchase Manager.

6. Each file sent will overwrite the previous version, ensuring the latest information is always available.

And of course, for your internal suppliers or the one-off quick catalog you need, Basware still supports buyer managed catalogs but always recommends utilising supplier relationships to develop supplier managed content.

Ready to learn more?

Ready to see how an e-procurement solution could drastically change your company for the better? Read our e-book to learn why you need an e-procurement solution and how it can benefit your organisation. Questions? Contact us for more information.