We are excited to announce an update to the sourcing grid that adds value for you and your purchasing operations.

These improvements will lead to more matches to vendor prices in the sourcing grid. Seeing prices for your Field’s requested items in the sourcing grid will allow you to issue POs to the vendors that are offering you the best terms. These improvements are driven by improvements to Kojo’s data infrastructure, which now more accurately understands and maintains the linkage between the items you have requested and what your vendor has responded with.

We plan to spend the next few weeks working closely with you as we continue to release improvements, and we’re excited to get your feedback.

We launched the sourcing grid in October 2023 to match field-requested items with vendor prices by using UPCs.

Since then, we have learned areas to improve. For example, vendors often respond to the same item with different UPCs, so the sourcing grids need a way to maintain and preserve the linkage between what the Field called an item and what the vendor responded with

This is where our updated data infrastructure comes in.

Instead of relying on perfect UPC and description matches, the sourcing grid now leverages an updated marketplace infrastructure to bridge the gap between buyer and vendor terminology and identifier differences. This will surface matching prices for Field requested items more frequently than before, allowing you to make faster sourcing decisions since you can compare pricing right within the grid.

This update will include pulling pricing data from uploaded vendor price sheets and historically mapped pricing data from integrations. Next, it will include historically mapped pricing data from OCR sources that scan invoices. This will follow because it is not as reliable as a direct integration since vendor documents do not always have a unique identifier—such as VPN, UPC, or MPN—listed on the items they respond with.

The sourcing grid will work most effectively when the Field selects “structured” items because it will use that structure to find a matching price from a historic record or from a pricing sheet. The most commonly used structured sources in our product are Quick Order and the Catalog but also includes Material Lists. Manual entry will result in matches so long as it is an exact description they’ve used before.

Kojo is continuing to invest in improvements like the sourcing grid based on your feedback. Additionally, you will see an increase in the amount of items in the grid yield matching price results. The sourcing grid will be stocked with more data from vendors and third party data providers to improve the quality of the information that you will see.

Pricing data will also be expanded in addition to exploring availability of materials, as this is often the biggest driver to making sourcing decisions. Kojo is dedicated to partnering with vendors and working with them on availability data in the sourcing grid so that you can make even more efficient sourcing decisions.

We are excited to build the future of construction procurement, and we cannot do that without your participation and feedback.

So, please reach out to our support team (support@usekojo.com) or book time with our product team directly.