axis diplomat 2020 eBusiness Modules

5. eProcurement

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Extends the functionality of your axis vMerchant trade (B2B) website to provide multi-level purchasing control to account customers.
 

5.1 The eProcurement Module

eProcurement is an additional module that is particularly suited to those businesses looking to offer enhanced purchasing control to their corporate clients.

With the eProcurement module added to axis diplomat and your axis vMerchant web site, you can

  • specify a contact within your customer’s organisation as the main eBusiness contact
  • allow that main contact to create and maintain their own subsidiary operators
  • restrict individual operators within that customer’s organisation by spending limit or to
    requisitions only
  • allow main operators to approve requisitions and convert to orders
  • hide pricing from specific operators
  • restrict specific operators to only buying from a contract shopping list
  • include branch-level controls, including the ability to pick up pricing and contract item lists from the head office, with overrides for specific branches and notifications to head office of orders placed by branches
  • provide reporting capability to the main contact of orders placed by the company or by the branch within the last day, week or month

The configuration of the controls for each operator and/or branch office can either be carried out by you or by your customer. Where you wish to configure those controls, this is done simply through the standard Customer Account facilitites within your axis diplomat Sales Ledger. Where you decide to give your customers the ability to maintain their own operators, they do this through a login-protected section of your web site. Any changes that they make are automatically fed back into your axis diplomat Sales Ledger, so that you can easily see the configuration of a particular Customer Account without needing to log on to your web site.

 
 

5.2 Background

Many businesses that deal with corporate clients need to offer a more sophisticated online ordering system to those clients than simply the ability to add products (albeit at their trade pricing) to a shopping basket.

Typically, the requirement will be for companies supplying goods that do not go through the corporate client’s usual purchasing department, such as stationery and electronic office supplies, packaging and cleaning materials. Where this is the case, those corporate clients will often ask for additional controls in your web site to allow them to restrict the purchasing power of their staff.

There may be a requirement to hide pricing from certain members of staff; this is often coupled to the ability to restrict their purchasing capability to a small agreed list of items. There is usually a requirement for the manager of that corporate client to be able to produce reports from your web site showing the purchasing that their staff have been undertaking.

They may also wish to restrict specific operators to only placing requisitions; unapproved requests, which they can simply approve, amend or cancel before being passed to your system for processing. Some clients may want the ability for their manager(s) to maintain these privileges and restrictions themselves, or you may prefer to offer this service to your customers, as an additional reason for keeping regular contact with your clients. Whichever you choose, the information is synchronised so that there is only one place where you need to look to find all of this information – the customer account details on your Sales Ledger.

All of these facilities are covered by the eProcurement module, in conjunction with the standard eBusiness module, which provides the interface between the axis diplomat accounts and order processing (back office) system and the axis vMerchant web site.