Over the past few years COINS has been gradually adding its customer base and their suppliers to the COINS-etc community. It has mainly been used to date as a trading hub for the electronic exchange of supplier documentation and invoices.

However with the recently announced collaboration between COINS and Science Warehouse, COINS-etc users can really begin to see the productivity and efficiency benefits of e-commerce.

The technology to enable electronic trading has been available for many years. For the construction industry however, with many major specialist and general suppliers the main difficulty has always been the standardisation and cross referencing of index and catalogue numbers across suppliers.

With an advanced catalogue management capability and an established and growing user community, full ecommerce now becomes a reality for the construction industry with COINS-etc. This will potentially provide a huge competitive advantage for COINS customers as well as providing efficiency gains for their suppliers.

Many of the major contractors and house builders in the UK are using COINS and over 70 of the industry’s largest suppliers are already signed up to trade electronically with them. The introduction of the COINS eCatalogue Centre alongside the COINS trading hub makes it easy for buyers to search through various on-line catalogues to find the right products and the best prices and drop the details onto their electronic orders.

Our market research identified Science Warehouse as the best-in-class provider for the advanced catalogue management capability we were looking for. COINS-etc now leads the way with an easy-to-use search facility able to handle large volumes of complex product information, typical of the construction industry. The COINS e-catalogue solution matches COINS in robustness and scalability which is essential for our major clients.

An early adopter of the technology commented: ‘It was very clear that the functionality offered by e-catalogue was far superior to the punch out method being used with the majority of suppliers. The ability to compare and search for product and the richness of the data simply improves the procurement process. Customers will benefit from availability of accurate cost price information on site, at the click of a button.’ E-catalogue offers a more informed way of buying and the solution is one that users are familiar to work with.