Assessing Internet-based Procurement to Support the Virtual Enterprise

With most organizations spending at least one third of their income on purchasing goods and services, procurement holds significant, but often overlooked, business value. Purchasing processes are frequently very inefficient with communication primarily occurring on paper and workflow routines being complex, timeconsuming, and expensive. Additionally, companies only rarely fully leverage their buying power across different organizational units. The situation is even more problematic in environments that are distributed across organizational boundaries as is typical for virtual