Aligning e-Procurement Systems with Sourcing Processes for Indirect Goods

Abstract

Corporate procurement processes can be divided into sourcing and operational buying, while items to be procured are generally classified into direct goods and indirect goods. A single e-procurement system cannot meet all the business requirements, and not all e-procurement systems are equally suitable for supporting different procurement processes. Most of the literature on e-procurement systems was concerned with a single e-procurement system and without matching procurement processes with different e-procurement systems. Among the e-procurement barriers are inadequate e-procurement solutions and inadequate business processes to support e-procurement. Therefore, the adoption of different e-procurement systems supporting different procurement processes is needed, but one of the difficulties is to find, deploy, and utilize the right solutions to the right places. In order to provide a solution to this problem of sourcing processes for indirect goods, we first introduce a process-centric framework for aligning various e-procurement systems with sourcing and operational buying processes for indirect goods. Then, based on the framework, we align the sourcing processes with various e-procurement systems. Aligning various e-procurement systems with operational buying processes for indirect goods and procurement processes for direct goods are not covered in this paper. The framework and alignment in this paper can help companies effectively adopt various e-procurement systems and can be further extended.