تاثیر تأمین الکترونیکی تجهیزات: تجاربی از پیاده سازی در بخش دولتی بریتانیا

The advent of the Internet as a business systems platform has been a catalyst for major changes in the operation and status of organizational procurement. Early e-procurement literature forecast significant improvements in procurement costs, an improving status of the purchasing function, and changes to the structure of supply markets. Our study seeks to evaluate the validity of these forecasts through the development of a structural model of the ‘e-procurement effect’. This model is intended to define the dynamics of the e-procurement process in an organization and provide a foundation for a research stream into the transformational effect of e-procurement deployment. The article presents the evaluation of e-procurement implementation and operation from an 18-month study of e-procurement deployment across nine UK public sector organizations. The article explores five key themes in e-procurement, namely system specification, implementation management, changes to organizational characteristics, changes in total acquisition costs, and changes to governance structures. Our analysis suggests that the proposed structural model of the e-procurement effect is broadly applicable and that many of the previous claimed benefits in the literature can be realized. We also contend that an important variable for the success of e-procurement adoption is to address the internal service quality attributes of e-procurement processes—a topic which offers significant scope for future research.

As noted by Nelson et al. (2001), purchasing accounts for the majority of organizational spending. As such, the advent of web-based electronic procurement has been heralded as a ‘revolution’ because of its potential to reduce the total cost of acquisition (Croom, 2000; Essig and Arnold, 2001; de Boer et al., 2002; Wyld, 2002; Rai and Tang, 2006). It is also expected to impact on the nature of supplier governance, either reinforcing market-based relationships (Malone et al., 1989; Barratt and Rosdahl, 2002) or encouraging virtual hierarchies (Brousseau, 1990). Finally, the e-procurement revolution is expected to enhance the status and influence of the purchasing function within organizations (Croom, 2000; Osmonbekov et al., 2002). Much of the e-procurement literature to date has (naturally) focused on early adopters. The particular areas of interest in these studies relate to system implementation, identifying efficiency effects, speculating the potential changes in supply chain configuration that may occur, and positing that e-procurement will have a major impact on the function by leading to its outsourcing or conversely raising its strategic role. Using a case-based approach, our study explored the issues relating to implementation and impact of e-procurement. The objective was to inform the development of a conceptual structural model of the key decision variables, mediating variables and outcomes from the e-procurement process. In this respect, the paper is a ‘theory in development’, intended to inform not only our on going research (Croom, 2000, Croom, 2001 and Croom, 2005; Croom and Johnston, 2003; Croom and Brandon-Jones, 2005), but also the work of others in the field. Our study investigated a number of UK public sector e-procurement programmes at both local and national government levels. Since this study originated as a commissioned investigation for a UK government body, all names and some data have been disguised due to issues of confidentiality.

This paper has provided an overview of the main findings from our study of e-procurement in nine public sector organizations. The intention here has been to examine the impact of e-procurement implementation and operation on organizational processes and performance in order to develop a model of the ‘e-procurement effect’ (Fig. 4). This model draws on the initial summary findings from our case analysis and cross-references the various summary factors indicated in the previous section.The e-procurement effects model outlines the main causal variables in implementation which impact on e-procurement performance. Naturally, the model is a relatively simple schematic at this stage, but serves to provide insight into the dynamics of the process through which we have seen e-procurement drive change. Considering how e-procurement implementation influences governance structures, we found evidence of reduced search costs leading to increased supply availability, and hence greater leverage in negotiation. We also saw an increased level of communication driving knowledge sharing between customers and suppliers. Therefore, rather than see a move towards increased market-based relationships (Barratt and Rosdahl, 2002), we found that e-procurement tends to reinforce existing hierarchical relationships among firms (Brousseau, 1990). We also found evidence of the impact e-procurement implementation has on the total cost of acquiring goods and services. The cost of processing purchase requisitions was reduced through improvements to the procurement system, but also the reduction in maverick purchasing. Price reductions accrued from increased visibility, compliance, management information, demand aggregation, and increased leverage in negotiations. When considering the affect of e-procurement on organizational characteristics, the most significant issue to emerge from our study was the role of internal service in e-procurement. Our analysis suggests that the reputation of the procurement function and the general disposition of an organization towards e-procurement is strongly influenced by users’ perceptions of internal service. Whilst we support the view that e-procurement implementation creates the potential to improve compliance, it is clear that compliance is far from ‘given’. The extent to which internal users are provided with support to use e-procurement appears to have a significant effect on maverick spending. As a practical implication, managers should question the extent to which they can ‘force’ individuals to use e-procurement and focus instead on delivering e-procurement in a way that ‘encourages’ its use. E-procurement was heralded in the literature pre-2000 as offering significant opportunities for the purchasing function and the procurement process. This paper has explored some of the operational issues surrounding implementation and roll-out in order to provide further insights to the debate in this area. It has allowed us to develop greater understanding of the factors at play in delivering the benefits attributable to system adoption and deployment. To improve our understanding of the mechanisms and processes by which these benefits are gained, this article presented an e-procurement effects model as a foundation for ongoing research into e-procurement implementation. We believe that this model will serve as a basis for classifying existing e-procurement research and directing future collaborative and comparative work in the area.