ZUGSEIL Catalog Hub

Catalogs have been the main tool for sharing knowledge on products between business partners for centuries. b-op also continues this tradition and uses digital catalogs as well. The b-op trade sphere offers powerful functionality of creation, maintenance and sharing of catalogs. For partners, which have their b-op digital, catalogs can be published and used seamlessly.

ZUGSEIL has built a powerful UI to make our customer get the max from this core b-op tradesphere feature.

Supported core processes

Before any business between parties can start, the catalog definition process has to be triggered, which is facilitated by the catalog manager app. In this process the owner of a b-op digital defines and shapes an offering which it wants to post to the digitals of its business partners. In this process the contents, the audience and the validity can are defined. The catalog is freely editable at any time. The owner of the b-op digital can share that current state of the catalog with his peers by creating an immutable revision and setting its state to published. This makes the catalog revision available to the target audience and will immediately inform all existing subscribers of this catalog, that a new revision is available.

Member apps and services

• App:Catalog manager - The main tool for creation, editing and managing catalogs created by the local digital.

Catalog definition

Before a catalog can be exported, it must be defined. Catalog definition spans a wide variety of information

• definition of base data - catalog name, validity period, publishing pricelist and currency. Who has the permissions to edit this catalog?
• define general catalog state - Is the catalog served to partners? Is it discontinued?
• definition of target audience - for which business participants will this catalog be available?
• definition of contained products
  • individual products - define design products or products and variants and customizations published with this catalog
  • sub-catalogs - name catalogs recursively, of which all products will be incorporate into this catalog
• definition of contained categories - which categories are distributed with this catalog and which category maps?
• catalog publishing state and versioning - catalogs can be edited at any time. Still, only catalog revisions can be shared with customers. For this, users may perform a revision freeze, which creates a legal document, which is stored with all contained data as catalog file in the document management system. This file is shared over the b-op network. Catalog publishing states are:
  • created - The catalog is created
  • changed - The catalog has been modified since its last version-freeze. Changes exist.
  • published - The catalog has been published and no changes have occured since the last publish
• definition of revisioning triggers - once changes have occured, will this catalog be frozen regularly through events or only manually? Triggers can be:
  • time interval
  • predefined timepoint(s) [daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly]
  • after a contained sub-catalog revisioning occured at an own catalog
  • after a partner sub-catalog revision was accepted

Catalog subscriber management

This app is used for monitoring of the catalog distribution and subscriptions of other digitals.

• show subscriber info - which business participant have subscribed to this catalog? Which version does the partner currently use (publishing date)? Has the partner accepted, subjected or has not reacted to the current version of the catalog.
• invite digitals to use this catalog - use the yellow pages service to link to b-op digitals and propose the subscription of this catalog

Catalog usage management

This app is used to see the catalogs by other digitals currently used by the local digital

• show which catalogs from which digitals are currently used
• show available revisions and trigger download (if not downloaded yet)
• show available revision updates and display changes to the currently active revision and financial impact
• enable auto-download and auto-adoption of new catalog revisions
• accept and upgrade to new revision after checking the changes
• reject new revision upgrade and provide reasons to catalog publishing party

B-Op Catalog integration with legacy P2P software

Since 2016 as b-op tradesphere was defined, all business participants can have their own b-op digital and are fully and digitally integrated at no cost.

But the Procure-To-Pay (P2P) process chain has been around way before 2016 and has been target for digitalization for long time. As a result of this legacy software exists for this process chain, each with a lot of customers which can not just switch to a b-op based system at once, but must ways to at least partially use the benefits instead before a migration project can start.

The ZUGSEIL P2P Hub allows the integration with 3rd party Procure-To-Pay plattforms, like SAP Ariba amongst others. This also enables the:

• export of b-op catalog revisions to a 3rd party formats (like CIF or cXML)
• import of CIF or cXML catalogs into a new digital's catalog revision (if any changes occured)

Related articles

• App:Catalog manager
• App:Catalog Import Manager (CIM) - The main tool to create and maintain catalogs.
• Customer Catalog Manager (CCM)- The main tool for creating, maintaining and publishing catalogs to customers
• B-Op Yellow-Pages - The main tool for connecting and automated digital connection in trade networks
• ZUGSEIL P2P Hub - offers automation tools for catalogs and other Procure-To-Pay (P2P) objects.