A cutting edge eProcurement solution provider for B2B traders: PunchOut2Go

The Silicon Review

A PunchOut Catalog is an eProcurement solution that makes it possible for a B2B buyer to make a purchase on a supplier’s eCommerce website from within the buying organization’s own eProcurement, spend management, or enterprise resource planning platform. In simple terms, a customer leaves (or “punches out” from) their procurement application and enters the supplier’s online catalog where they are automatically authenticated. The store is personalized for that buying organization with any contracted pricing and discounts. The buyer can add items to their shopping cart as usual, but instead of checking out, the cart data is transferred back into their eProcurement application for necessary internal approval based on their business process. When the order is approved, a purchase order is created in the supplier’s eCommerce store.

PunchOut is one piece of the puzzle, with the addition of further automation enabled by PunchOut2Go—purchase order automation, eInvoicing, eQuotes, and advanced shipping notifications—buyers and suppliers benefit from end-to-end procurement automation that simplifies and accelerates the procurement-to-pay process. PunchOut2Go was founded on the premise to provide scalable solutions that empower B2B buyers and suppliers to transact electronically, while best leveraging their chosen technologies, reducing the cost and complexity of integrations for sell-side and buy-side B2B businesses using a plethora of eCommerce applications and eProcurement platforms that today powers tens of thousands of integrations, globally.

Companies around the world are heavily investing in commerce technologies and digitization efforts. PunchOut2Go is helping these companies leverage and do more with commerce than ever before. Industry averages show that 12-15% of a company’s business is derived through eCommerce, 25% through eProcurement, 35% through VAN networks, while the rest is all manual (phone, fax, email, etc.). The silos of how orders are derived diminish when companies leverage PunchOut2Go. They are helping organizations achieve over 50% of their business through eCommerce, eliminating IT-to-IT friction and old school ways of integrating with eProcurement and VANs, leveraging the commerce technology to do more and streamline customer onboarding.

PunchOut2Go was founded in 2011 and it is based in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In conversation with Brady Behrman, Co-Founder and CEO of PunchOut2Go

Q. The complex and unintuitive user interface is one of the biggest challenges and needs careful consideration. How do your developers help clients to overcome this challenge?

We’re helping organizations leverage their own infrastructure to transact between commerce and procurement. Modern eCommerce and personalization efforts created are a substantial user interface improvement on traditional electronic catalogs. Likewise, eProcurement provides a superior experience, “marketplace effect”, compared to old-fashioned email-based procurement workflows. But without integration between them, buyers and suppliers end up wasting a tremendous amount of time transferring data manually from one platform to the other, a tedious and error-prone process. With automation like PunchOut catalogs and purchase order to invoice automation, manual work is removed from the procurement process, allowing buyers and sellers to take full advantage of the modern user interaction offered between SaaS eProcurement and eCommerce applications.

Q. Are your services ready to cater to the needs of ever-changing digital transformation?

Our iPaaS solution plays a vital role in enabling digital transformation for our customers around the world. The real power of our platform is to allow the hundreds of commerce and procurement technologies to connect between trading partners, regardless of the technology they have invested in or plan to invest in. Whether it’s EDI, cXML, XML, OCI, iDOC, API’s, or a plethora of other communication “standards”, PunchOut2Go is “The Standard” to facilitate and automate these transactions between procurement and commerce. Without PunchOut2Go’s scalable integration solution, many of our clients would not be able to fully digitize procurement workflows with end-to-end connectivity and communication across incompatible platforms.

Q. What are the challenges in eProcurement and B2B commerce integration? How does your company fill that void?

PunchOut2Go offers a scalable solution that helps B2B buyers and suppliers to integrate their sales and procurement platforms faster, cheaper, and more reliably. Buyers and sellers recognize the benefits of integration and automation, but it is expensive and time-consuming to build custom integrations that enable PunchOut catalogs and other sales order-to-invoice procurement automation. There are hundreds of eCommerce applications and eProcurement platforms. They use incompatible data protocols and communications standards, as well as various factors on how organizations individually leverage their technologies— they can’t “talk” to each other, and no two integrations are the same. Because it is so expensive and time-consuming—industry average lead times are around six months—suppliers and buyers integrate only their top-line suppliers, if any at all, leaving millions of transactions to be processed manually. The PunchOut2Go iPaaS acts as a translation layer. We support any eCommerce application or eProcurement platform, making it fast and easy to connect any combination of buy-side and sell-side software. Via the PunchOut2Go iPaaS, we cut integration lead times from months or years to hours and days, substantially reducing integration costs.

Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?

We are constantly adding new offerings to help our customers adapt to the ever-changing needs of their customers. Since its inception, PunchOut2Go has been laser-focused to mitigate the gaps and enhance transactions between procurement and commerce. These gaps are opportunities for the value that PunchOut2Go provides customers and partners. They consist of various technologies and transaction sets, including requisition to sales orders to eInvoicing and the nuances from system to system— and most importantly from trading partner to trading partner. Our ecosystem of commerce and procurement technologies, as well as the acceleration partners supporting these technologies, continue to expand worldwide to drive quantifiable value to all those served collectively.

Meet the man behind the success of PunchOut2Go

Brady Behrman is the CEO of PunchOut2Go. He Co-founded PunchOut2Go in 2011 with Shawn McKnight, who serves as PunchOut2Go’s Chief Technology Officer. Earlier in his career, Behrman founded a web development and marketing agency, working on a variety of B2B eCommerce solutions. He observed that the lack of integration between B2B supplier eCommerce platforms and buyer eProcurement platforms reduced procurement efficiency and inflated procurement costs for both buyer and seller.