Design and implementation of an e-Procurement system

The advent of e-Business has brought a global revolution in the way companies conduct business that touch every aspect of business: from customer relations to managing suppliers, subcontractors and trading partners. Among various e-Business systems and technologies, e-Procurement is considered as a key challenge. The challenge has been taken up by many ICT suppliers and lots of new tools have emerged. However, the current commercial offerings are not adequate to fully support the business requirements of strategic procurement. This paper describes the issues and design principles of an e-Procurement system. It explains the overall development processes which include generic procurement processes, data entities used in the system, functional diagram and technical architecture in order to give readers a guideline for e-Procurement system development. In addition, we address some of the implementation issues and workflow example considering other systems.