Successful use of e-procurement in supply chains
Thomas Puschmann and Rainer Alt
interaction between the manufacturer and the supplier without any manual processes.
. Mobile procurement. Adding mobile access to e-procurement applications is an option that has not yet been widely adopted. Gebauer and Shaw (2004) report a case study in which a field service engineer can create a purchase request for a field repair job. The application provides functionality in three areas: creating purchase requisitions; approving requisitions; and checking the status of requisitions. Mobile procurement enhances existing e-procurement solutions and makes the application independent of the location where it is used. The benefits are high mobility; support for simple activities like tracking, access to ad hoc information, and reachability.
Future research can address these new areas of improvement and analyze in detail the integration of mobile and collaborative procurement functions into existing solutions. The study described in this paper was limited, because it was only a snap-shot. That’s why another topic for further research is the empirical validation of the success factors which were identified in the benchmarking project. A third subject for further research can be the embedding of the success factors into procedure models for the introduction and implementation of e-procurement systems.