to gain greater transparency over their procurement portfolio with the availability of more detailed data.
The benchmarking project showed that all successful practices have strengths in certain areas. Babcock Borsig, for example, focused on the support of procurement processes in operational and strategic issues with the marketplace EC4EC that not only supported indirect but even direct procurement processes. Bayer, on the other hand, had a strong focus on content management. The company defined a high percentage of its indirect product volume and developed a catalog that also served to build up a new business segment with the marketplace cc-chemplorer. Cisco’s e-procurement solution was characterized by a high degree of integration on a systems level. The young company history provides the advantage of avoiding data redundancies on a global basis. The e-procurement systems are tightly integrated with other operational systems. This allows Cisco a very high degree of transparency and standardization. The same can be said about SAP. Because of the company’s IT focus, it has been using its own electronic marketplace since 1999 for the procurement of PCs from Fujitsu Siemens. The establishment of the emaro marketplace was the next step in this direction. A completely new dimension of e-procurement is provided by Xerox. The company traditionally has a strong focus on the procurement of services and it began very early with the bundling of services in catalogs.
All the companies analyzed collected know-how concerning e-markets. But most of them did not plan to substitute their internal catalogs by catalogs hosted on e-markets. In fact, these companies believed that electronic marketplaces complement their existing e-procurement solutions with functionality for strategic procurement issues (e.g. requests for quotations). Other companies used their internal catalogs to found e-markets, as the examples of Babcock Borsig and Bayer show.
Table IV summarizes the success factors which were identified in the benchmarking project and maps them against
Table IV Summary of success factors