In today’s business world, there is a strong emphasis on the need to lower costs. The recent recession forced many businesses to look at how they could drastically reduce costs without adversely affecting the quality of their output. One widely adopted way of addressing this pressure is to introduce a system to manage the entire procurement process electronically.
For a large corporation with many suppliers, that historically has sent paper orders to suppliers it is relatively easy to forecast benefits from such automation. Unfortunately, there is often a flaw in this logic. Similarly the position of SMEs and the use of Supplier Portals need to be considered.