Purchasing Process

There are lots of reasons to do e-procurement but most of the stated reasons are not the real reason at all. Indeed, most of the reasons stated for implementing e-procurement are impossible to deliver. But there is one very good reason to implement e-procurement and oddly, the functionality that delivers it is usually not available from the e-procurement vendors.

I've been working with e-procurement in a wide variety of guises and in many different organizations for nearly 20 years. Before the widespread use of the internet there were some proprietary on-line purchasing systems that were, by and large, the same as a modern incarnation of a web based e-procurement system. And they all have one thing in common - they don't work. To be fair, they're getting better but still, most implementations are an expensive set of broken promises. It's not always the technology that's at fault - sometimes it's the promises that are wrong - expectations are set unrealistically. Or its the functional design that's wrong - business requirements ignored or misunderstood. And it's such a shame because e-procurement was such a good idea. So what's gone wrong?