Catalog Management: Technical and Functional Component Requirements (Part 3) — Maintenance, Workflow and Analytics

If there were ever an esoteric yet critical insider series on technology aimed at procure-to-pay process owners, this is it. In the past year, the Spend Matters analyst team has spent hundreds of hours tearing into the catalog management capabilities of all the leading e-procurement vendors as part of our SolutionMap analysis, as well as in the course of vendor selection work for clients. Our main finding: No catalog management solution we’ve seen is interchangeable with another — and most leave a lot to be desired.

As our catalog management series continues, we turn our attention to the technical and functional components of the maintenance, approval/workflow and analytics components of catalog management, whether used on a standalone basis with ERP procurement or when integrated as a component of e-procurement. So far in this series (see Part 1 and Part 2), we’ve defined the specific components of catalog management and explored supplier network intersections and tie-ins based on the Spend Matters SolutionMap RFI requirements. We’ve also gone into the weeds, delving into the functional definitions and technical components of catalog creation, supplier onboarding and data quality control components.