'It's just like buying a book from Amazon — just a business-to-business version,' he said.
But he warned companies that that e-procurement still has to be approached sensibly and set up professionally.
Technical hitches are a down side to e-procurement, which relies on servers to remain up and running. Business may be badly affected by technological hiccups.
'There are some substantial savings, but you have to be careful,' Fothergill said. 'There are as many horror stories as success stories. People are just dipping their toes into e-procurement. If properly used it is a very efficient method.'
No paper handling saves the cost and time of issuing invoices — and some companies send and receive hundreds of thousands of these a year.
Fothergill said that many companies do not know what their MRO (maintenance repair and operation) spend is, but when using e-procurement spend is very visible — enabling a company to get better deals.
He said some suppliers are still unwilling to supply online, because they fear set-up costs will be too high.
Some companies, he said, may have as many as 800,000 low cost products on catalogue, and the cost of maintaining a website containing so many products would be high.
Source
The Facilities Business