Relevance of PunchOut Catalog in B2B Environment

If you want to stay relevant in your B2B business, it is mandatory to implement a PunchOut solution for your large customers. To put it simply, corporates and government organizations are unlikely to show interest in your business proposition if you cannot offer PunchOut. Not able to reach large customers due to PunchOut, clearly conveys the importance of this technology. PunchOut technology connects B2B procurement users directly to supplier’s contract catalog. So if your B2B customers are using a SAP procurement system, it is important that you incorporate a SAP PunchOut solution for your client. The SAP purchasing system use the open catalog interface (OCI) format, instead of the usual cXML format, for data transfer. The biggest advantage using this technology is that you are able to offer a personalized shopping experience to each and every B2B customer, which is critical to drive customer loyalty and retention. With this technology, you can create a separate catalog for every B2B procurement user. This offers a great amount of convenience for your large customers as they don’t have to browse through non-contract products. Their catalog will contain contract products only. SAP ecommerce integration with PunchOut gives customers easy access to their respective supplier catalog. Moreover, it completely removes CIF catalog nightmare as making changes in PunchOut catalog is just a few clicks away. Unlike CIF catalog, modifications in PunchOut catalog is neither time consuming nor labor intensive. Also, as a supplier, when you change pricing of any specific products or delete certain products from PunchOut catalog, the customer can view it in real time. No loading the catalog to view the changes. Customer is able to access product pricing and availability in real time whenever he logs into his PunchOut catalog. On the whole, to get that competitive advantage in the B2B market, it would be foolish to ignore PunchOut solution.