ZUGSEIL Procurement Tools

Every B-Op Digital which is acquiring products from other B-Op Digitals and/or is distributing products within its organizations naturally takes the B-Op Network role "customer". For this role, ZUGSEIL has developed the ZUGSEIL Procurement-Suite. This package offers a complete set of tools allowing customers manage their entire supply chain ecosystem and digitally perform all necessary interactions required with their staff and supplying business partners.

The main functionality blocks are related to procurement, warehouse & supply chain management and internal fulfillment & asset management. Many customers also decide to add our extension packages personal equipment management or procurement support system.

Functionality of the Procurement Suite

Most important building blocks of successful procurement are identification of the best suppliers and making the right procurement decisions on a daily base. This sounds easy - but it is not. ZUGSEIL Procurement-Suite supports you with both of these tasks.

Source to contract

With supplier relationship management each organization aims for oprimizing its personal ecosystem in the trade sphere by identifying potential suppliers and manage the relation with them. No IT system can currently find you the best suppliers but just support you by precompiling a list of possible suppliers. So this core task stays with your strategic buying team!

After the identification of the right supplier so far always has been the starting point of a cumbersome and costly (IT) integration-process. The further you wanted to digitally integrate the more effort you had to invest - time and moneywise.

This is where ZUGSEIL shines and offers unique functionality. Full digital integration comes with just a couple of clicks. Our ZUGSEIL BEST Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) integrates with the B-Op yellow pages. Through it, you can just identify suppliers and get introduced. Once this has been done, you define with your partner your mutual level of trust - and that is it. All relevant information is exchanged in the backgroud automatically.

You are ready to go to negotiate and create your contracts digitally: Our ZUGSEIL BEST Enterprise Contract Management (ECM) offers full digitalization of all Source-To-Contract (S2C) processes from initial contact to the signed contract, its execution and retirement.

With the contracts being set up your partners will now digitally provide you their catalogs and you can start building your internal catalog from the products made available by your supplier partners. Our ZUGSEIL BEST Product Information Management (PIM) allows you to specify, modufy and classify your own product catalogs based on the products of your suppliers

Requisition Creation & Approval

Requisition creation is the starting point of procurement. ZUGSEIL BEST Shop (BS) offers your organisation an entire toolset for creating purchase requisitions and provides process guidance to the processes until a purchase is made. Extending the regular shop functionality also extension packages are offered like ZUGSEIL BEST Personal Equipment Management (BS-PEM) ot ZUGSEIL BEST Procurement Support System (PSS).

Procure-To-Pay

Once the purchase requsition was created and approved either the internal fulfillment process or the procurement core process starts, depending if the goods are available on local stock or must be acquired from suppliers. This decision making is supported by our ZUGSEIL BEST Procurement & Automation Tools (PAT) functionality, which allows the creation of a ruleset to route purchase requisitions automatically and remove repeating decisions from the procurement officers' workloads.

After the purchase order has been placed with a supplier, the b-op network enables real-time progress tracking on the supplier side, which allows advanced supply chain monitoring by default and without the need for extensive IT integration projects. This delivers unprecendented visibility into the supply chain, which ultimately offers more reaction time after the detection of supply-chain failure threats.

After goods are recieved the invoice is recieved fully digital from the supplier, allowing automated invoice checks and validation, which reduces the standard work effort in bookkeeping while speeding up processing times.

Return-To-Refund

In many cases procured goods are directly shipped from a supplier to an internal customer. Like all direct procurement fulfillment this is error-prone for wrong article, wrong variant, ... and for many reasons. In most eCommerce-cases direct procurement comes with return quote between 5% and 40%. In enterprise procurement scenarios this case is almost never covered as considered irrelevant, rendering wrong products to be unused, thrown away, ... causing a high-cost position which is invisible to controlling as the process is not covered by most systems.

This is where ZUGSEIL shines again by offering a fully digitalized process called Return-To-Refund as part of its ZUGSEIL BEST Quality and Returns Management (QRM). The covered process chain starts with the creation of a return order and ends with the refund of the returned goods. All processes of the customer and the supplier side are fully digitalized and transparent. This helps organizations to bring light into a process which was so far ignored and now becomes controllable.

Warehouse & Supply Chain Management

Automation and digitalization of these procurement processes deliver value to our customers. Once the order is placed, the fulfillment process should be tracked until the goods have arrived. The B-Op Technology allows real-time tracking even in multi-level supply chain. This allows quick reaction on supply chain disturbances. Once the goods have arrived, ZUGSEIL Warehouse Management System (WMS) ensures that goods are accepted and stored.

For tracking individual products in areas of perishables, medical goods or other items requiring article instance tracking, the warehouse management is fully integrated with our ZUGSEIL BEST Lifecycle Management (LCM), which enables to exactly know each station in the lifecycle of a single article instance. This can be extremely helpful when products can be reusable/refurbishable or require regular maintenance to ensure their readiness for operation.

Quality and Returns management are a major effort for any organization, especially as these processes are very communication intensive with the suppliers. ZUGSEIL BEST Quality and Returns Management (QRM) takes care of digitalization and automation not only of the internal processes, but also of a fully digitalized supplier communication the Return-To-Refund Process even over multi-level supply chains.

Internal Fulfillment & Asset Management

Intra-org fulfillment processes make sense for all kinds of organization. There are two typical scenarios for internal fulfillment:

• Central warehousing for products, where disposition and warehousing must not be outsourced. This can be for various reasons like reduction of logistic costs by using an intra-org logistic, mandatory central quality control, required process integration with other core processes, ...

• Many small buffer stocks for products which must be available locally, e.g, for immediate hand out or to take back used goods for reuse scenarios.

Both cases are supported by our ZUGSEIL Warehouse Management System (WMS). In all cases black-out areas like local buffer stocks become visible and controllable with ZUGSEIL BEST Customer.

Asset Management is also a major concern to many companies. They need to know where the procured goods are currently and who is using them. This also goes along with servicing and refurbishing management, e.g. like equipment laundry&repair service, workplace equipment tracking or product lifecycle management related tasks. They are covered by our ZUGSEIL BEST Lifecycle Management (LCM) which allows the seamless integration of service providers within service supply chains.

Modules and Bundles

All this functionality provided as part of the ZUGSEIL Supplier-Suite provides a powerful toolset which is capable of digitalization of most complex procurement scenarios spanning over multiple B-Op Digitals. The functionality of the ZUGSEIL Supplier-Suite bears these ZUGSEIL Service Bundles, which are all certified by B-Op.

• ZUGSEIL Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)
• ZUGSEIL Enterprise Contract Management (ECM)
• ZUGSEIL Product Information Management (PIM)
• ZUGSEIL BEST Shop (BS)
• ZUGSEIL BEST Personal Equipment Management (BS-PEM)
• ZUGSEIL BEST Procurement Support System (BS-PSS)
• ZUGSEIL BEST Service Scheduling (SRS)
• ZUGSEIL BEST Quality and Returns Management (QRM)
• ZUGSEIL BEST Lifecycle Management (LCM)
• ZUGSEIL Warehouse Management System (WMS)
• ZUGSEIL Procurement & Automation Tools (PAT)

Also ZUGSEIL offers product bundles, which is a precompiled standard configuration of modules, which can be subscribed by customers over the cloud and have a toolset for getting started easily. Currently we offer these cloud products:

• ZUGSEIL BEST -

Related Pages

• ZUGSEIL Supplier-Suite

Planning and Management Related Pages

• Dev:SHOP Stream roadmap
• Dev:SHOP Stream specification roadmap