ZUGSEIL Shop

The ZUGSEIL BEST shop is a multi purpose shop application with advanced features like shopping purpose driven assistants or artificial intelligence (AI) to support its users to get their job done with minimal time. ZUGSEIL BEST Shop can be employed to create purchase orders for customer purchasing or purchase requisitions for internal ordering.

Configurability

The ZUGSEIL BEST Shop shop is a highly configurable application, which offers the flexibility to our customers required for delivering their individual shopping requirements to internal or external customers. The configuration is mainly done by defining shopping purposes. Depeding on its requirements each organization may have various shopping purposes, which allow in-flight configuration and simultaneous usage of the shop in different shopping purposes.

Extensability

ZUGSEIL

ZUGSEIL BEST Personal Equipment Management (PEM)

Personal Equipment Management supports our customers to organize the processes of taking care of their employees being well equipped for their job. There are many reasons, why organizing these processes is essential for most organizations.

You can read up here on what PEM is and who it can be useful for.

ZUGSEIL BEST procurement support system (PSS)

Large procurement organizations come along with the challenge for regular employess to find the correct procurment unit/office for the procurement of a specific good. The procurement support system (PSS) helps any organization member to easily identify easily the correct procurment path, details and the appropriate contact persons driven by classification data created in PIM and AI based learning. This saves the regular employees and the procurement officers an ever growing fraction of the time used up by mislead procurement requests.

You can read up here on what PSS is and who it can be useful for.

General user flow

General ordering Flow in internal Shop

When the user enters the shop the fundamental flow of the shopping process is determined by the shopping purpose, which the user has implicitly or explicitly selected. Depending on the settings made in the shopping purpose, the user interface of the shop is rendered depending on the shopping assistants defined as part of the shopping purpose.

No matter which shopping purpose the user has - the fundamental process stays always the same:

• In the intial Target Selection Phase, the user implicitly or explicitly selects a shopping purpose.
  • Some shopping purposes are requiring a customer digital selection (Point-Of-Sales/Point of Service usage scenario)
  • Some shopping purposes require one or multiple targets, like an employees, a workplace or a project, ... (Internal Ordering usage scenario)
• After the shopping purpose is selected, the product selection phase starts.
• After the products are selected, the user has to check out phase.
  • Eventually, if the order is does not meet rules imposed by the organization, it has to enter the Equipment Related Clearance Process process
  • Eventually if the internal order is associated with local stocks (e.g. org-unit local stock) direct handout might occur

After checkout and direct handout have been processed, the internal order is created. From there order is passed to fulfillment processes.

Phase 1: Shopping purpose selection

Warning:

Central to the entire shopping process is the initial selection of the shopping purpose.

The shopping purpose selection is the first decision to be made. There are two scenarios how the shopping purpose is selected by the user:

• Explicit Purpose Selection
  When the user starts the internal ordering process, the shop shows a shopping purpose selection screen (A1)
• Implicit Purpose Selection
  By a link on a widget on the B-Op Synapse Desktop the shopping purpose may be preselected. The administrator defines as a setting of the widget, that it starts the shop with a static shopping purpose being preselected. This saves the user from having to select the shopping purpose each time he clicks on this icon. Example for such a widget on a B-Op Desktop Widget is "Place personal equipment order".

Phase 2: Target entity selection

Although the shopping assistantsare becoming active in Phase 3, some require as mandatory precursor a target entity selection. These assistants require the target selection:

• Personal Equipment Assistant (PEA) requires an employee to be selected
• Workplace Equipment Assistant (WEA) requires a workplace to be selected
• Task Equipment Assistant (TEA) requires a Task/Project to be selected

As part of ZUGSEIL BEST Assisted ordering functionality, entitlements can be defined, which are matched by specific algorithms to the target entity. Depending on the settings in the shopping purpose the target is identified automatically. This is checked in the decision making process B1. If the shopping target could be determined automatically, the user is automatically forwarded to the product selection screen (A5). In all other cases the user must manually define a shopping target depending on the settings in the shopping purpose. The shopping purpose has three options for target selection.

Target Workplace selection (A2)

When purchasing equipment for a workplace a workplace selection screen is summoned.

Target Person selection (A3)

Target person selection can have a lot of variations, which are cleared up by a couple of decisions:

1. Same-Digital Shopping case vs Remote-Digital Shopping Case
   Depending on the shopping purpose definition, the shop can persons which are requesting equipment from the local digital (Same-Digital Shopping Case) and/or persons which are coming from another organization, which want to procure items from the local digital (Remote-Digital Shopping Case).
   Example for Remote-Digital Shopping Case: A customer from a remote digital comes into a physical shop (point-of-sale) of the digital. In this case the user is the shop sales person and the shopping target is an employee of a remote digital.
2. Defining the target person
   Once the organization of the origin of the target person is selected, the target person itself can be selected by the query tools defined by the source organization.
   
   Depending on the strictness of data protection settings of the source organization query parameters are available. Example for available query parameters are name, organizational unit, staff number, ...
3. Defining the target person`s order base (optional)
   Some shopping purposes do required an order base (example: "Entitlements"). When the target person has only one of these no selection is required. Sometimes the target person may have multiple and in this case the user will have to select the appropriate order base.

Target Project selection (A4)

When purchasing equipment for a project, a project selection screen is summoned.

Phase 3: Product selection

When defining the shopping purpose the main goal is to assist the shop user during the shopping process.

This can be done through selecting the appropriate UI through the shopping assistant and by defining the shopping purpose to narrow down the set of available products in the shop.

Narrowing down products happens over:

1. The base set of products: Catalog selection When defining the shopping purpose, the administrator must define the products catalogs from which the base set of products available in the defined shopping purpose is defined.
2. Target specific product subset
   After the shopping target is selected, the shopping purpose allows various rules to narrow down the set of available products to the shopping target
   • The shopping target may be limited to purchase products of certain classification elements (applicable in Same-Digital Shopping Scenario). Example: A regular employee of a police department may not purchase weapons by himself
   • The shopping target may be limited by its hosting digital to a list of certain products (applicable in Remote-Digital Shopping Scenario) Example: A employee may only purchase shoes of the vendor shop, which he is visiting on the cost of the company he is employee of.
3. Hiding certain products
   Certain shopping assistants do not make all available products visible at once, but make certain articles only available through certain actions , which might require shopping assistant specific permissions granted only to a certain group of users. As a result products are generally available to the shopping purpose, but regular users do not "reach" them. Example: In the Personal Equipment Assistant only the entitlement products are shown. Only users with special permissions can add additional products to the shopping target`s entitlement.

Phase 4: Checkout

As in regular shops, the user has to define how to pay and the desired delivery information. The internal ordering checkout process inside a legal person comes with special requirements, like mandatory cost center selection, multiple delivery addresses per position, position split and many more, which can be read up on the checkout variations page. Using shopping assistants may also reduce the complexity of the checkout process, making internal ordering a very simple action.

Direct Handout from local stock

In many organizations each business unit has a small stock to fulfill the raised demand by an internal order immediately. This process is enabled, if an internal order is placed by an authorized user for accessing the local stock, when the user is ordering for himself or another person. The direct handout is integrated into the process, so that all the warehouse-fulfillment process is properly booked, but with zero additional effort by the local stock manager. This is a great timesaver and enables organization wide asset controlling. [So far most local stocks are not kept in the ERP/Financial systems and typically black holes regarding capital binding as well as stuff lying around without any control on it]

Related business epics

• Internal Ordering

Contained in products

• ZUGSEIL Equipment Shop
• ZUGSEIL Procurement Suite