Buyer-hosted catalogs are hosted, as the name suggests, by the purchasing organization.  A single catalog is built with product and services information from multiple suppliers.  It is used by all purchasing staff and has a common user interface, no matter which supplier the product or service is ultimately obtained from.

Buyer-Hosted catalogs are:

• Singular (one catalog fits all)
• Unified (consistent look and feel)
• Supplier independent (contains selected products and services from more than one supplier)

Suggested Commodities
Direct material: mass-produced mechanical parts; products with pre-negotiated or stable prices; strategic maintenance, repair, and operation (MRO) items (such as packing material).
Indirect material: office supplies; standard MRO items; products with unstable pricing.

Before Extracting or Bulk Loading Content
It you are extracting categories from Oracle Purchasing, keep in mind that the existing category structure will be reproduced in the Oracle iProcurement catalog.  This also means that this is an opportunity to create a multi-tiered structure before extraction.
If you are going to create a category structure in Oracle iProcurement, you’ll need to create or load these categories using schema editing or bulk loading, and then map these categories to Oracle Purchasing categories.

Think first about how you want the catalog to look and be structured:

• Will you use only extracted items and categories?
• Will you use only bulk loading?
• Will you use both methods?
• Are the categories you extract sufficient, or do you want to create a different category structure for iProcurement users?

Extracted Item Sources Requirements

To extract items from Oracle Purchasing documents certain conditions must be met. First and foremost is that the item must belong to a Web enabled Purchasing category set. Then the conditions indicated in the table above must be met.
Source Document
This is the Oracle Purchasing document type. Blanket indicates a blanket purchase agreement. Quotation indicates an existing Oracle Purchasing quotation.
ASL
ASL stands for Approved Supplier List. If indicated in the above table, the item must be included in an active ASL.
Supplier Item #
Indicates that a supplier item number must exist in the Oracle Purchasing document.
System Item
Indicates that the item must be correctly set up as a purchasing item in Oracle Purchasing or Oracle Inventory as a master item that is enabled for the operating unit you are extracting.
Other requirements
This column in the table identifies other requirements that must be met for the Oracle Purchasing document to be considered for item extract. Typically these are that the document must be approved, the document’s effectivity dates must indicate that it is active, and that the document amount limit has not been exceeded.
Oracle Purchasing Contract Agreements
Not listed in the table, but very much a part of the ordering process are contract agreements. They have no items and therefore are not considered during extraction. However the still have requirements that must be met to be used for automatic sourcing. Similar to blanket agreements, they must be approved, the document’s effectivity dates must indicate that it is active, and that the document amount limit must not be exceeded.