e-Procurement: From Strategy to Implementation

Chapter 5. The E-Procurement Software Landscape

Objective In order to better understand the current trends in Internet-based e-procurement, it is important to review several of the key events that have occurred in the evolution of e-procurement so far: E-procurement came about in the late 1990s as an improvement of EDI technologies and as a way to conduct purchasing transactions over the Internet. Originally based on electronic catalogs, the complexities of catalog maintenance quickly gave rise to third-party hosting. With the expansion of software capabilities, the original one-to-many model gave way to a second, many-to-many model of procurement. The many-to-many model then provided the impetus for entry into the e-procurement arena of many new ...