How Do Procurement Networks Become Social? Design Principles Evaluation in a Heterogeneous Environment of Structured and Unstructured Interactions

Expanding procurement networks involving many countries, organizations and people impose challenges on procurement e-business systems. Firstly, the classic document exchange based connection approach across company borderlines is still both time consuming and costly. Secondly, today’s systems provide limited support for people networking dimensions, combining structured and unstructured activities as part of the entire business process. We argue that the potential for accelerating the intra and inter firm procurement processes by addressing the challenges of integration and heterogeneous activities is not sufficiently leveraged at present. In this paper, we present the results of our design science research focusing on the evaluation of design principles along a software artifact, towards effects on procurement network performance.