As we mentioned in a previous blog, What is a Procurement Marketplace, a procurement marketplace serves as the front door to procurement by connecting agency staff to your approved contracts and approved suppliers—creating a centralized location for key procurement activities. The purchasing process doesn’t have to be complicated or fall solely on procurement team members. With a procurement marketplace solution, there’s opportunity for procurement teams to equip agency staff to shop approved products and suppliers on one platform while ensuring on-contract spend and complete compliance.
One of the major advantages of utilizing a marketplace solution is its flexibility—it adapts to your needs rather than forcing you to completely overhaul your existing processes. This means you can integrate automation into your purchasing workflow without disrupting established procedures. Whether your agency is just beginning to explore automation or already has systems in place, a procurement marketplace provides the ability to seamlessly align with your operational requirements.
Marketplaces are designed to offer maximum configurability. They can function as a standalone platform to streamline purchasing activities or integrate directly with your existing ERP for a more connected and cohesive process. This ensures that the marketplace solution not only enhances efficiency but also fits naturally into your team’s current approach.
In this blog, we’re going to walk you through three of the main marketplace types that exist to help you decide how you can best configure new, automated processes into your existing workflow. Let’s dive in!
What are the 3 Marketplace Types?
What is a Punchout Marketplace?
If your organization requires direct login capabilities with an ERP account—a fully connected system that integrates with leading platforms like SAP, Oracle, or eFinance using cXML punchout—the punchout marketplace software can ensure efficiency and precision. With a punchout marketplace, you can optimize transactions and facilitate approvals through your ERP system, driving operational excellence.
How Does a Punchout Marketplace Work?
Punchout marketplaces simplify the purchasing process for staff by seamlessly integrating with ERP systems. When an employee logs into their ERP account, they can easily access the marketplace through a single click on the “PunchOut” link. Thanks to the PunchOut connection, employees are automatically logged into the marketplace without needing to enter separate credentials. This streamlined entry ensures quick and secure access to a wide range of supplier catalogs.
Once in the marketplace, employees can effortlessly browse or search through supplier catalogs to find the items they need. They can add products to their shopping cart and proceed to checkout with ease. Instead of completing the typical checkout flow directly on the marketplace site, their shopping cart is sent back to the ERP system as an XML file. From there, employees can create a requisition based on the cart and submit it for approval, all while remaining within the familiar ERP system. A punchout marketplace offers a user-friendly and efficient workflow, enabling staff to manage procurement tasks effortlessly and focus on more strategic priorities.
What is a Standalone Marketplace?
In contrast to a punchout marketplace, a standalone marketplace is a versatile solution designed for organizations seeking a standalone platform that simplifies their purchasing operations without requiring integration with an ERP system. With its streamlined approach, it caters to agencies that prioritize independence and agility in their workflows. This solution is ideal for organizations that don’t have an ERP, their ERP doesn’t offer a marketplace, or their ERP has weak workflow and approval capabilities—aiming to enhance efficiency while reducing the complexity of managing additional systems.
How Does a Standalone Marketplace Work?
With a marketplace solution, your agency can compile suppliers & contracts into a single online platform for purchasers. This gives your agency a wider range of vetted suppliers for your staff to shop with more goods & services to choose from directly within the platform. Your marketplace users will only need to login to a single platform to complete the purchasing process.
By providing your staff with a compliant, centralized marketplace, they will have the tools they need to be self-sufficient in many of their routine purchases. This simplifies everything from the purchase requisition & approval, to generating a PO, to receiving the goods.
Solutions like Euna Marketplace are powered by things like federated (multi-vendor) search, side-by-side comparisons, multi-vendor checkout, and AI-powered savings advisors that identifies price savings while allowing staff to shop and cut down on wasted time.
A standalone marketplace, specifically, streamlines the entire purchasing process by offering a seamless experience for shoppers. This type of marketplace is a great option for agencies that don’t have an ERP or that don’t like the shopping and requisitioning capabilities of their existing ERP. Users can log in directly to the marketplace, browse from a curated list of pre-approved suppliers, and easily select the items they need. Once the shopping is complete, the checkout process is straightforward—shoppers submit their requisitions directly through the system for approval by the appropriate stakeholders. From there, orders are automatically generated and sent to suppliers, ensuring efficiency, accuracy, and a hassle-free workflow for everyone involved.
What is a Many-to-Many Marketplace?
A many-to-many marketplace is a robust platform designed to address the complex needs of organizations with distributed administrative structures. It combines the best features of a punchout marketplace and a standalone marketplace, offering tools for managing various departments, users, addresses, approval workflows, and more. With the ability to customize settings by agency, it provides unmatched flexibility in structuring operations. This makes it an ideal choice for cooperatives and Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs), enabling multiple agencies to access a shared supplier marketplace while maintaining their own unique configurations. Additionally, users can seamlessly log in and place purchasing card orders without sacrificing the advanced ERP capabilities they rely on.
One of a many-to-many marketplace’s standout features is its versatility. It can cater to large individual agencies, such as state organizations, that require a centralized platform to manage multiple departments. Each department within the agency can leverage the system to streamline operations while benefiting from a cohesive, agency-wide solution. Whether used across various agencies or internally within a single organization, a many-to-many marketplace can be thought of as a series of personalized marketplaces with centralized administration that empowers users with the tools and flexibility they need to drive efficiency and collaboration at scale.
How Does a Many-to-Many Marketplace Work?
In alignment with a punchout marketplace, a many-to-many marketplace can seamlessly integrate with one or many ERP systems, allowing a multitude of shoppers across agencies or departments to login and access the marketplace and all its functionality (including searching catalogs, sending orders back to the ERP as XML files, and creating requisitions for approval).
Find a Marketplace Solution that Meets the Precise Needs of Your Organization
Whether you work in education or for a state level agency, Euna Procurement’s Marketplace solution is designed to meet you exactly where you are. With highly configurable capabilities, our marketplace solution brings maximum efficiency to public sector procurement operations. Want to learn more benefits about using a modern marketplace solution? Check out our Euna Marketplace blog series, giving you everything you need to know about optimizing spend, increasing compliance, and mobilizing your staff.
Ready to see the solution firsthand? Request a demo today!