Since 1980, Essent has offered the systems, service, software, and support critical to success in today's highly-competitive marketplace.To reach an efficient and user-friendly purchasing process for your entire organisation, Catalog Management is of crucial importance. The Essent family of fully-integrated products and services combines best practices, business processes, software automation, and network communications to deliver unparalleled, unified business management solutions. For configurable products, a CIF catalog is used in conjunction with a PunchOut Catalog.įully-integrated business management solutions for Promotional Product Industry Distributors, Suppliers and Decorators.Įssent is the leading provider of fully-integrated business management software solutions and services for process-intensive industries and the largest trading network for the promotional products industry. CIF can represent simple products or services, but cannot be used solely for items that require configuration. CIF has no direct representation for product specifications, bill of materials, or product configuration rules. The simplicity of the Catalog Interchange Format comes at the price of product configuration. Instead of focusing on mundane catalog management, purchasing departments could allocate more time on spend management.

Through the CIF standard, suppliers can easily publish catalogs and buyers can easily import them. The major benefit of an electronic catalog, CIF or otherwise, is that it eliminates the need for buyers to manually enter item information into their procurement system or convert files from one format to another. The hierarchical format allows parent/child relationships, like with size/color apparel product matrixes, to be represented with relatively minor overhead.

Catalog Interchange FormatĬIF is a hierarchical comma separated variable (CSV) double-quoted format comprised of a file header, line data, and file trailer.

CIF has grown into a de facto standard and is widely used by hundreds of thousands of companies throughout the world. After their founding in 1996, Ariba®, a leader in electronic procurement, introduced the Catalog Interchange Format (CIF) as their standardized electronic file format for supplier catalogs. A CIF Catalog is a digital file format used to electronically communicate a product or service catalog from a supplier to a buyer.

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