the pooling of
purchase requisitions and procurement-oriented product
development are tasks that are typically assigned to strategic
procurement. Prior to e-procurement, strategic procurement
often had to deal with administrative routine work as well,
such as individual transactions, converting purchase requests
into purchase orders or ensuring the correct allocation of
invoices received. Strategic aspects are frequently neglected in
the process, with the buyer having little influence over the
choice of suppliers and the purchased products. The use of
Internet technologies in procurement is aimed at realizing
faster and more efficient operational procurement processes
which bypass the purchasing department and enable those
people to concentrate on more strategic tasks (Giunipero and
Sawchuk, 2000; see Figure 1). In e-procurement, requesters
directly search for and select products in electronic catalogs
which are authorized and negotiated by strategic procurement
in advance.