--- sourceDocument: Yokohama Finance and Supply Chain sourceDocumentLink: https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/r/yokohama/source-to-pay-operations Release : - yokohama ft:locale : - en-US ft:publication_title : - Yokohama Finance and Supply Chain ft:clusterId : - stpop bundleId : - stpop workflow : - Employee --- # Exploring Sourcing and Procurement Operations # Exploring Sourcing and Procurement Operations {#ariaid-title1} * Release version: Yokohama * * Updated January 30, 2025 * * ![](https://www.servicenow.com/docs/portal-asset/ico-clock) 4 minutes to read Summarize ![AI sparkle icon](https://servicenow.com/docs/portal-asset/ai-sparkle-icon) Summarized using AI This content was generated using new OpenAI-powered functionality. Results are provided on an as is basis and are not guaranteed to be accurate or complete. ## Summary of Exploring Sourcing and Procurement Operations ServiceNow® Sourcing and Procurement Operations (SPO) offers a comprehensive suite of applications designed to streamline procurement processes for employees, shoppers, and requesters. The platform automates the sourcing and purchasing of goods and services, enhancing efficiency and user experience in organizational procurement activities. Show full answer Show less ## Key Features * **Shopping Hub:** Provides an e-commerce like experience for employees to self-service their requests and manage a catalog of goods and services. * **Source-to-Pay Common Architecture:** Centralizes purchase orders, requisitions, and sourcing requests to support source-to-pay processes. * **Sourcing and Purchasing Automation:** Automates workflows for sourcing requests and purchase requisitions, enhancing operational efficiency. * **Procurement Case Management:** Allows employees to request services from procurement and helps manage those requests effectively. * **Performance Analytics:** Offers dashboards to assess spend and team performance, requiring a separate Performance Analytics license for activation. * **Mobile Access:** The Shopping Hub Mobile application enables procurement engagement via mobile devices, enhancing accessibility. * **Virtual Agent:** Provides a conversational interface for employees to interact with sourcing and procurement functionalities. * **Process Mining:** Utilizes platform capabilities to analyze and improve source-to-pay workflows. ## Key Outcomes By utilizing Sourcing and Procurement Operations, organizations can expect: * Streamlined procurement processes that reduce manual work and improve efficiency. * Enhanced visibility and control over procurement activities through analytics and dashboards. * Improved employee satisfaction via simplified access to procurement services and resources. * Better decision-making through structured category management and sourcing pipeline initiatives. * Integration of advanced technologies, such as AI search and punchout capabilities, to enhance the user experience. Use ServiceNow® Sourcing and Procurement Operations to provide your employees, shoppers, or requesters with a simple automated tool that they can use to shop for goods and services that they need at work. ## Sourcing and Procurement Operations applications {#exploring-spo__section_ygd_jt2_2sb} Sourcing and Procurement Operations (SPO) comprises the following applications: {#exploring-spo__section_ygd_jt2_2sb__entry__2} | Application | Description | |-|-| | Shopping Hub | With this application, provide a streamlined, e-commerce like experience for your employees to self-service requests, and source or purchase products and services through the procurement organization. This is an add-on experience to Employee Center. Shopping Hub enables you to do the following: * Manage a catalog of goods and services that your employees can use to order items that they need for their jobs. * Simplify and streamline the way employees request help in sourcing or procuring goods and services. * Suggest and guide employees to the correct suppliers. * Provide transparency into the procurement process with regular updates. {#exploring-spo__ul_etl_bv5_dxb} For more information on these, see [Using Shopping Hub](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/0ndXfhlQzRfqi5nRDBTLLQ "Use the Shopping Hub module to request pricing or place an order for products and services. You can also request for products or services that you don’t see in the catalog, revise, replace, or return your ordered products and services, customize your top suppliers, work on your to-dos, and much more."). | | Source-to-Pay Common Architecture | With this application, provide an architecture to store purchase orders, requisitions, sourcing requests, and other objects that are commonly used across the source-to-pay business processes. For more information on these, see [Components installed with Sourcing and Procurement Operations](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/kKmTA4lv42nyNWiuLVGlAg "Several types of components are installed with the activation of Sourcing and Procurement Operations, including tables, user roles, and scheduled jobs."). | | Sourcing and Purchasing Automation | With this application, provide workflows and automation for sourcing requests, negotiations, and purchase requisitions. For more information on these, see [Sourcing and Purchasing Automation](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/Mc~Py~dE0Ephniz~fyxBbA "Sourcing and Purchasing Automation for ShoppingHub includes workflows that help support the user interface purchasing experience for the shopper. These workflows consist of sourcing requests, negotiations, purchase requisitions, contracts, purchase orders, receipts, and invoices."). | | Procurement Case Management | With this application, enable all your employees to request services from the procurement team, and allow the procurement team to manage those requests. For more information on these, see [Procurement Case Management](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/XDrgia_5WzfU2ZJwmuo0NA "With the Procurement Case Management application, you can enable your employees to submit procurement cases and access your organization's knowledge base. You can also enable your procurement teams to automate their fulfillment processes so that they can manage and monitor the progress of their tasks."). | | Playbooks for Sourcing and Procurement Operations | With this application, provide a set of pre-built playbooks, workflows, and experiences for your employees, sourcing, and procurement to automate work that is typically managed through emails and spreadsheets. For more information on these, see [Purchase revision flows](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/eXN2ZnIyGrw3reD7HLJ~zg "As a procurement administrator, you can leverage or modify the existing workflows to process the purchase modification requests raised by shoppers."). | | Source-to-Pay Workspace | With this application, provide a single environment for your Procurement Specialists to work on purchase requisitions, sourcing requests, negotiations, procurement requests, and more. For more information on these, see [Source-to-Pay Workspace](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/UR7FwXEqV4vcSqAPiJ78KQ "The Source-to-Pay Workspace provides experiences and tools that you can use to work on various activities, such as procuring goods, onboarding high-performing suppliers, and processing invoices."). | | Advanced Work Assignment for Source-to-Pay Operations | With this application, provide configurations to support automatic routing, queuing, and assignment of procurement cases, emails, and live agent chat conversations. For more information on these, see [Advanced Work Assignment for Source-to-Pay Operations](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/IPTtX0i1oJ_j3s66KkWleQ "Use the Advanced Work Assignment for Source-to-Pay Operations feature to automatically assign work items to agents based on availability and capacity."). | | Performance Analytics for Sourcing and Procurement Operations | With this application, provide a set of pre-configured metrics and dashboards to assess spend, operational efficiency, and team performance across the Sourcing and Procurement Operations product. Visually analyze how you are placed with your work and achievements over a given period of time, with the Procurement Buyer Dashboard. For more information on these, see [Procurement Buyer Dashboard](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/zAIElEfJ02IQEK1kQPteQw "Visually analyze how you’re placed with your work and achievements over a given period of time."). Visually analyze how your organization is placed strategically and operationally, over a given period of time, with the Procurement Strategy \& Ops Dashboard. For more information on these, see [Procurement Strategy \& Ops Dashboard](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/hlpTo4kYMKbAq3rnHwtijw "Visually analyze how your organization is placed strategically and operationally, over a given period of time."). Visually analyze how your team is performing on sourcing requests, purchase requisitions, negotiated savings, and negotiation outcomes, over a given period of time, with the Procurement Team Performance Dashboard. For more information on these, see [Procurement Team Performance Dashboard](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/g_2Ws~TQ0LPmyMony_E_TA "Visually analyze how your team is performing on sourcing requests, purchase requisitions, negotiated savings, and negotiation outcomes, over a given period of time, with the help of the Procurement Team Performance Dashboard."). Note: Activation of this application on your production instance may require a separate Performance Analytics license. | | Shopping Hub Mobile | With this application, enable Shopping Hub and other employee experiences for procurement within the Now Mobile application. For more information on these, see [Shopping Hub Mobile](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/uffEy6Bj5o7UMcKmNr4olQ "The ServiceNow Shopping Hub Mobile app enables you to engage with procurement organizations from a mobile device. Shopping Hub Mobile is available on the Now Mobile app and is supported on iOS and Android devices."). | | Virtual Agent for Sourcing and Procurement Operations | With this application, provide pre-configured topics for sourcing and procurement within a conversational interface, for employees to raise requests, find knowledge, and complete tasks. For more information on this, see [Virtual Agent for Sourcing and Procurement Operations](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/RD9rcOmZS7zwBUAhykoQhA "ServiceNow Virtual Agent for Sourcing and Procurement Operations enables shoppers to quickly find and purchase products that they're looking for from a vendor on ShoppingHub, by interacting with a virtual agent from Employee Center. It also allows shoppers to view purchases, procurement tasks, procurement cases, and even work on their to-dos. They can also get help from the procurement team using Virtual Agent."). | | Natural Language Understanding Models for Sourcing and Procurement Operations | With this application, provide Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models to enhance the virtual agent conversation interface, using natural human utterances to detect the correct conversations intended by employees. For more information on this, see [NLU support for Sourcing and Procurement Operations Virtual Agent](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/PskzeYoSC4avkxKCJ0lbjg "You can set up Sourcing and Procurement Operations Virtual Agent to use Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to understand word meanings and word contexts to infer user intent."). | | Common Service Delivery | With this back-end application, store Finance Case, Finance Case Line, Finance Task, and Playbook status tables, as well as other infrastructure that forms the basis of Finance and Supply Chain workflows products. | | Finance Common Architecture | With this application, maintain primary data such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) sources, legal entities, accounting periods, and so on. For more information on these, see [Components installed with Finance Common Architecture](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/CDSoeZVjBZD6Lhny7PZtvA "Several types of components are installed with the installation of the Finance Common Architecture application, including tables and user roles."). | | Process Mining for Source-to-Pay Operations | With this application, provide your customers with the ability to use Platform's Process Mining capabilities on the Source-to-Pay workflows to which customers are entitled to analyze and improve source-to-pay processes. For more information on this, see [Process Mining](https://www.servicenow.com/docs/access?context=process-mining&version=yokohama&pubname=yokohama-now-intelligence&ft:locale=en-US). | | | | [ ] ## Optimize digital purchasing workflows {#exploring-spo__section_jzl_wdg_jdc} Figure 1. The platform for digital purchasing workflows Deliver intelligent and contextual shopping experiences to automate work across organizational silos and systems. ## Helpful resources {#exploring-spo__section_helpful_resources} Here are some additional ServiceNow resources that can help you: Release Notes : Learn more about what's new and changed. See the [Sourcing and Procurement Operations release notes](https://www.servicenow.com/docs/access?context=sourcing-procurement-operations-rn&version=yokohama&pubname=yokohama-release-notes&ft:locale=en-US). ServiceNow University : Access real-time courses, self-paced training, and career resources, such as [SPO Implementation Essentials](https://learning.servicenow.com/lxp/en/source-to-pay-operations/sourcing-and-procurement-operations-spo?id=learning_course_prev&course_id=e9eb688747714e105cbdaf44846d432c) and more, from [ServiceNow University](https://learning.servicenow.com/lxp/en/pages/servicenow). Now Create : Log in to your ServiceNow account and find additional information about implementing and deploying Sourcing and Procurement Operations features at [Now Create](https://learning.servicenow.com/nowcreate). YouTube : Learn more about the value that you can add to your business with the Source-to-Pay suite. Watch [Multiply the value of your ServiceNow platform with Source-to-Pay workflows](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crQtfrCR6DY) on YouTube. ServiceNow Community : Connect with other Sourcing and Procurement Operations users at [ServiceNow Community](https://www.servicenow.com/community/source-to-pay-operations/ct-p/source-2-pay-operations). * **[My purchases on Shopping Hub](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/5t~ZNsWYNWZH_Tag5DDi5A)** As a shopper, you can view all the purchases made from your shopping account by selecting My purchases from your Shopping Hub profile. * **[Shopping Hub Mobile](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/uffEy6Bj5o7UMcKmNr4olQ)** The ServiceNow Shopping Hub Mobile app enables you to engage with procurement organizations from a mobile device. Shopping Hub Mobile is available on the Now Mobile app and is supported on iOS and Android devices. * **[Performance Analytics for Sourcing and Procurement Operations](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/RLsMjJAKrsOeG9O68m1CTA)** With this application, you can use a set of pre-configured metrics and dashboards to assess spend, operational efficiency, and team performance across the Sourcing and Procurement Operations product. * **[Sourcing and Purchasing Automation](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/Mc~Py~dE0Ephniz~fyxBbA)** Sourcing and Purchasing Automation for ShoppingHub includes workflows that help support the user interface purchasing experience for the shopper. These workflows consist of sourcing requests, negotiations, purchase requisitions, contracts, purchase orders, receipts, and invoices. * **[Procurement Case Management](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/XDrgia_5WzfU2ZJwmuo0NA)** With the Procurement Case Management application, you can enable your employees to submit procurement cases and access your organization's knowledge base. You can also enable your procurement teams to automate their fulfillment processes so that they can manage and monitor the progress of their tasks. * **[Source-to-Pay Workspace](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/iT1k4CmltMD0SgUETDW63Q)** As a Procurement Specialist, you can easily complete your actionable tasks within the premises of an enhanced user experience with Source-to-Pay Workspace. * **[Spend and Savings Management](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/QIfiJ_BvM55yR63TwlaRmQ)** Category management is a strategic procurement approach that involves managing a group of related products or services to maximize value, optimize costs, and enhance supplier relationships. Essentially, it's the structured management of category taxonomy, ensuring that goods and services are categorized, sourced, and managed efficiently to drive better decision-making and operational efficiency. * **[Sourcing Pipeline Management](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/AO~BRG26uVqG3I73qFg15A)** Sourcing Pipeline Management (sn_spend_pipeline) provides a centralized framework for creating, tracking, and executing sourcing initiatives through pipeline projects. It enhances efficiency through automated workflows, improves visibility into project progress, and simplifies savings tracking and forecasting. * **[Understanding punchout](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/wXnKMWB_9RsNTg8YcgEJYA)** Punchout is a technology that connects a buyer's eProcurement application directly to a supplier's eCommerce site, enabling the buyer to browse products, build a cart, and then have the cart redirected into the buyer's procurement system for checkout. * **[AI Search for Sourcing and Procurement Operations](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/1a37kuiY2AvtZU9QCbLCrQ)** The AI Search application provides a modern consumer-grade search engine for the Service Portal, Employee Center (EC), Mobile, and Virtual Agent.