UT Market

The UT Market electronic procurement system is aligned with the goals and vision of the Financial Resource Management System (FRMS). UT Market expands the availability of electronic commerce tools to faculty and staff at The University of Texas at Austin. UT Market:

• Facilitates quick, reliable creation of purchase orders from a broad base of suppliers.
• Provides a foundation for better supplier management that results in lower prices, quicker delivery, and superior customer service. An average of 66% of orders are approved the same day and 87% approved within 24 hours.
• Reduces paperwork and labor content in administrative processes.
• Improves accuracy and accountability in transaction processing.

UT Market is a hosted supplier package from Jaggaer, implemented by The University of Texas at Austin. In 2010, UT Market was introduced as a subsystem of FRMS and an alternative purchase order process to help automate the purchasing process. UT Market enables shoppers to browse for products across multiple suppliers, select items for purchase by putting them in a virtual shopping cart, and assign the cart to an authorized departmental buyer. The buyer completes the checkout process in UT Market and completes the order process by creating and approving a requisition in FRMS. The order is then transmitted to the supplier and products are shipped to the university. After the department receives the supplies and the supplier provides an electronic invoice, Accounts Payable reviews the receiving documents and transmits payment information to the supplier, completing the procurement cycle.

Interactions with suppliers are electronic. This eliminates the need to call, email, or fax suppliers to get quotes, or to inform them of approved purchase orders. Because details about items to be ordered are received directly from the supplier, less data entry is required on UT Market orders.

Purchasing Notes:

Every employee with a UT EID and active employment assignment will have access as a Shopper. A Shopper can access all UT Market catalogs, create shopping carts and assign carts to other users. A Shopper cannot check out carts, unless they also have the Buyer role. Shoppers can be graduate students and research fellows, if they have an active employment assignment. No registration process is required of a university employee to begin shopping in UT Market, but the employee does need to enter the site at least once to set up his or her profile.

UT Market is not exempt from purchasing policy and procedure, such as dollar amount thresholds. Orders exceeding $15,000 will route to the Purchasing Office for review and any suppliers without an existing competitively bid contract will require procurement justification.

Many of the suppliers have freight included within their pricing.  Others have shipping and handling charges that have been simplified so that the users will know what they will be charged and to facilitate easy payment processing.

HUB credit - Many of the suppliers on UT Market are certified HUBs (Historically Underutilized Businesses) and purchases from these suppliers count toward our support of the State of Texas HUB requirement.

Distinctions to make between traditional PO’s in POINT Plus and electronic PO’s in UT Market:

1. NO COMMENTS/SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS CAN BE ADDED – What you shop for in the catalog is what you get. Since orders get sent directly to order processing, it’s unlikely that any manual intervention will happen before the order is fulfilled. Any fields that ask for comments are internal to UT Austin only.
2. SUBSTITUTIONS ARE NOT SUPPORTED – This can cause problems for invoicing, receiving, and payment later on. If you need to substitute an item, you need to cancel the item on the order and create a new order for the substitute.

Receiving Notes:

Receiving is the part of the procurement process where the university acknowledges receipt of goods ordered through a purchase order. Receipt of the goods must be acknowledged before the university is authorized to pay supplier invoices.

• Campus Distribution Services — Campus Distribution Services (CDS) is the preferred shipping point for goods ordered by the university. Using CDS promotes safety and reduces campus traffic by decreasing the number of delivery trucks that come to campus. As an added benefit to departments that use CDS, receipts are created by CDS. Receipts created by CDS take three business days to finalize.
• Desktop delivery — Departments that elect to have goods delivered directly to their departmental offices must retain their own records of goods received. Some items must be delivered directly to the department rather than to CDS (live animals, plants, bottled gases, concrete, sheet rock, plate glass, and very large equipment). Be sure to specify the appropriate delivery address on the order. Receipts created by the department will finalize the same day they are created (that evening).

RECEIPTS CANNOT BE EDITED OR DELETED ONCE THEY ARE FINALIZED. This is because once it is finalized, the receipt will be used to match against an invoice to authorize payment to the supplier.

Suppliers Currently in UT Market

Resources for Training and Help:

Handbook of Business Procedures for UT Market

Training Resources

User Services UT Market page

Introduction to UT Market training

User Services Help Desk — for frequently asked questions

Supplier Inquiries

Suppliers are evaluated on criteria such as volume of annual orders, breadth of usage across campus, and technical compatibility with our eProcurement application, hosted by Jaggaer. If you are a supplier and would like more information about UT Market, please contact purchasing-utmarket@austin.utexas.edu.