Research Proposal E-Procurement
CHAPTER ONE.
1.0 INTRODUCTION
1.2 Background to the Study
E-Procurement is one of the technology advancement in the purchasing and supply departments in the public sectors. Confusion exists in defining the term e-Procurement (Vaidya, Yu, Soar & Turner, 2003). While the terms “e-Procurement” and “e-Purchasing” have been used synonymously in many jurisdictions in an attempt to prove their involvement in the e-Commerce revolution (MacManus, 2002), the term “purchasing” has a narrower scope.
E-Procurement refers to the use of Internet-based (integrated) information and communication technologies (ICTs) to carry out individual or all stages of the procurement process including search, sourcing, negotiation, ordering, receipt, and post-purchase review (Croom & Brandon-Jones, 2004). While there are various forms of e-Procurement that concentrate on one or many stages of the procurement process such as e-Tendering, e-Marketplace, e-Auction/Reverse Auction, and e-Catalogue/Purchasing, e-Procurement can be viewed more broadly as an end-to-end solution that integrates and streamlines many procurement processes throughout the organization. Although the term “end-to-end e-Procurement” is popular, industry and academic analysts indicate that this ideal model is rarely achieved (DOIR, 2001) and e-Procurement implementations generally involve a mixture of different models (S&A, 2003).
Although such end-to-end solutions offer robust and usually rich functionality, they are designed specifically to excel in just one or a few applications and thus pose various challenges (Cuthbert, Hamzic & Archer, 2003). Nevertheless, this study will refer to the end-to-end e-Procurement system in order to avoid confusion but will not consider general email, electronic fax, voice communications, or non-Internet/Web based approaches, which are regarded as partial traditional e-Procurement solutions. As one of the core enablers of an e-Business supply chain, e-Procurement in this
1.0 INTRODUCTION
1.2 Background to the Study
E-Procurement is one of the technology advancement in the purchasing and supply departments in the public sectors. Confusion exists in defining the term e-Procurement (Vaidya, Yu, Soar & Turner, 2003). While the terms “e-Procurement” and “e-Purchasing” have been used synonymously in many jurisdictions in an attempt to prove their involvement in the e-Commerce revolution (MacManus, 2002), the term “purchasing” has a narrower scope.
E-Procurement refers to the use of Internet-based (integrated) information and communication technologies (ICTs) to carry out individual or all stages of the procurement process including search, sourcing, negotiation, ordering, receipt, and post-purchase review (Croom & Brandon-Jones, 2004). While there are various forms of e-Procurement that concentrate on one or many stages of the procurement process such as e-Tendering, e-Marketplace, e-Auction/Reverse Auction, and e-Catalogue/Purchasing, e-Procurement can be viewed more broadly as an end-to-end solution that integrates and streamlines many procurement processes throughout the organization. Although the term “end-to-end e-Procurement” is popular, industry and academic analysts indicate that this ideal model is rarely achieved (DOIR, 2001) and e-Procurement implementations generally involve a mixture of different models (S&A, 2003).
Although such end-to-end solutions offer robust and usually rich functionality, they are designed specifically to excel in just one or a few applications and thus pose various challenges (Cuthbert, Hamzic & Archer, 2003). Nevertheless, this study will refer to the end-to-end e-Procurement system in order to avoid confusion but will not consider general email, electronic fax, voice communications, or non-Internet/Web based approaches, which are regarded as partial traditional e-Procurement solutions. As one of the core enablers of an e-Business supply chain, e-Procurement in this
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