SciQuest Catalog
| How to Use SciQuest | SciQuest Information |
SciQuest provides hosting service to UTHSC-H for electronic catalogs for our suppliers. The SciQuest catalog is interfaced to PeopleSoft FMS eProcurement module. When entering a requisition, selecting the CAT (catalog) option will allow you to select the SciQuest catalog. When you have completed shopping, selecting "check out" will populate the required information into the eProcurement requisition for further processing.
Prices are accurate and kept up to date by the supplier. Our agreement with our suppliers is that whatever price is on the catalog at the time of the requisition; that is the price we pay. Thus we do not need to spend time on disputes over invoicing.
Two of our suppliers (Sigma Chemical and Invitrogen) have thresholds for charging freight and may have special handling charges for things like dry ice to keep the product cold. We have worked with our suppliers to accommodate these business rules. When you build a requisition, these special charges are built into the requisition.
The SciQuest catalog is easy to use. Please see the "User Guide" for instructions on how to search for products and how to build and maintain a hotlist.
In addition, we currently "punchout" directly to four of our suppliers from SciQuest (Fisher Scientific, VWR Scientific, Invitrogen and Sigma Chemical). This allows our users to have access to the full catalog of products for these suppliers. Each of these suppliers also has functionality at their sites for our users to set up "hotlists" or "favorites" to facilitate the ordering of frequently needed items.
The four life science suppliers above plus our office products supplier are setup to use XML as a method of dispatching the purchase order. This allows the order to be electronically transmitted into their order processing system without being keyed in by a person. This assures quick and reliable entry of the order. Both the requestor and buyer will receive an email order acknowledgement. In addition, these suppliers invoice us electronically. This greatly improves our payment accuracy and minimizes the resources necessary to deal with these high transaction volume suppliers.
