Integrating with an Item Content Provider

The proliferation of Web-based catalogs has provided manufacturers with an easy and effective tool to locate components with the desired specifications at the lowest cost. The traditional catalog function now comes in a variety of forms to improve business to business communication between systems. Examples of the types of systems PeopleSoft defines as 'Item Content Providers' include Component Supplier Management (CSM) systems, market site aggregators, independent trading exchanges, and traditional catalog providers with new web interfaces. These systems benefit the design and purchasing of new products by accelerating item location, maximizing design reuse, and reducing acquisition costs.

Item Content Providers provide tools to classify and query item lists. This benefits engineering designs by enabling parametric search capability, maximizing design reuse, preferred parts selection, and efficient parts retrieval. You can use Item Content Providers to help reduce the number of redundant items in an organization.

On the procurement side of your organization, you can use an Item Content Provider to classify parts and suppliers, and set up business rules for supplier consolidation, and supplier performance management. It also helps with cost reduction by getting the correct and lowest cost components up front.

PeopleSoft provides several enterprise integration points (EIP) to these systems to maximize ease of importing item data into the PeopleSoft database. Using Application Messaging technology, you can keep this information up to date within the PeopleSoft system by subscribing to XML messages from an Item Content Provider system to the PeopleSoft EIPs:

• Item Definition (SetID)

• Item Business Unit attributes

• Item Revisions

• Supplier/Item attributes

Note:

For Item Content Providers, PeopleSoft supports inbound messages only.