March 28th - April 1st

DIRECTLY IMPACTS Your Purchasing Activities

BearBuy will be unavailable beginning at 9:00p on March 27 through April 1, to accommodate the SciQuest 14.1 and BFS 9.2 upgrades.  Please plan your purchases accordingly as no BearBuy purchases are to be made during this time.

In the event of a true purchasing emergency, please contact your Campus Buyer for assistance.  If you do not know who your Campus Buyer is, please contact Paul Mulligan at pmulligan@berkeley.edu for direction.

2. Upcoming 14.1 SciQuest Release and Live Q&A Webinar

The SciQuest 14.1 release will be available in BearBuy on Wednesday, April 2, 2014. 

We will be hosting a live 14.1 Pre-Release Q&A Webinar to go over the new features on Thursday, March 27 at 10a. 

 Click here to register for Q&A Webinar.

3. Voucher Process Changes

As part of the effort to continuously improve the BearBuy system and allow transactions to process more efficiently, effective April 2, stronger controls will be added to the BearBuy Voucher processes.  Highlights include:

• Payment terms available on a BearBuy Voucher will now default to only those negotiated with our existing suppliers.  
• Voucher Approvers will no longer be able to place a voucher in reject status.
  • If you find a voucher that should not be paid or needs rework from Disbursements:
    • Include notes in the Comments section explaining why the voucher should not be paid or what information should be revised.
    • Select Forward from the Available Actions drop-down menu at the top of the screen.  
    • Select the Central Accounts Payable staff member who will be the first person listed in the approval workflow.

For more on Vouchers, visit the  BearBuy Instructional Resources webpage for job aids and reference guides.

4. New!! Catering In BearBuy

Coming this May, Procurement and Accounts Payable will launch a new catalog, for ordering, approving and paying for catering and entertainment within BearBuy.  The catalog will include:

• Over 30 local restaurants and caterers
• Searching by cuisine
• Automatic payment for matching invoices under $1,000.00

We will hold a Town Hall in April to show case the catalog and business processes.  Seating is limited so please register to attend the Town Hall and learn more about this new functionality.

Catering in BearBuy Town Hall

Tuesday, April 29

10:00a - 11:30a

University Hall, Room 150

Click here to register for the Town Hall

America To Go will be on campus holding tasting events for departments.  If you would like to attend, or host a tasting event for your department, please contact Carolyn Greer at carolyn.greer@americatogo.com.

5. New Sigma Configurable Punch-out  

UC Berkeley announces a new Punch-out via Sigma-Aldrich for configurable products, which include custom oligos, oligo-modifications, siRNA, qPCR probes and primers, specialty primers, custom RNA oligos, and custom peptides. Oligos start at the price of 11 cents per base for oligos at 0.025um.

This Punch-out can be accessed through BearBuy and is available to all researchers for use as of March 14, 2014. This punch-out allows scientists to easily access Sigma's low price for custom products and provides free ground and 2-day shipping on all orders. We encourage all researchers to use the new Sigma Punch-out to purchase custom products at a lower price.  We are excited to deliver the Sigma-Aldrich Punch-out for configurable products as the first of many custom products made available in BearBuy for the research community.

With this newly implemented Sigma-Aldrich Punch-out, we hope to provide continued support to the Research Community by reducing costs while maintaining quality and overall service.