E-procurement Systems as Tools for the Development of Supply Chains

The Supply Chain Management is a strategy that has allowed the organizations that have established in their business models a competitive advantage. The supply chain is a network of elements, where different key process such as: procurement, manufacturing, distribution, inventory, customer services, and information should be managed and controlled to meet customer requirements. To achieve this goal, different tools have been developed to help to the key processes of the supply chain; one of these tools is the e-procurement system, which helps an organization to control the interactions with the most crucial suppliers.

A Complex Adaptive System Thinking Approach of Government E-Procurement in a Cloud Computing Environment

The main focus on e-Procurement in this chapter will be the public (government) e-Procurement, which is part of a larger whole, namely e-Government. e-Procurement and e-Government are very important tools for the government to act in this fast changing society. But as for must business, the tools may be important, but the vision and the strategy to use these tools are much more important. Therefore the chapter discusses e-Government and e-Procurement in their strategic contexts, in which intelligence (contextual integrated information) is a key factor to survive. The reason is because the government is a Complex Adaptive System (CAS). Without intelligence and the agility of its structure and processes, the government will not survive, or at least it will be less efficient and effective in developing strategies and in executing these strategies. The game theory discussion will show that the flexibility and agility of the e-Procurement system (together with a good strategy) are key factors for a successful system; otherwise e-Procurement is more of weakness in the government’s value chain of procurement of goods and services. In the last part of the discussion on Cloud Computing and e-Procurement, the author argues that ERP systems (so called best practices) are not well adapted to other contexts than the simple context of the Cynefin Framework. Service Oriented Architecture solutions can provide better (adapted) solutions for e-Procurement. Cloud Computing in combination with SOA may be the next generation solution.

Electronic Tax Filing

Governments are seeking to benefit from information technology by incorporating various government services online for the benefits of the citizen. The Malaysian government as part of its Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) project introduced e-filing in 2006, which is the process of filing taxes using the Internet as one of the e-government services. This is an exploratory study to model the determinants of intention to use an Internet tax filing system. The authors used 4 variables as predictors or intention to use which were perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived risk, and facilitating condition. Data was collected from 100 respondents using non probability purposive sampling via a structured questionnaire. As hypothesized, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and facilitating condition were positively related to intention to use. The findings show that perceived usefulness has the strongest influence on intention to use (ß = 0.341), followed by perceived ease of use (ß = 0.278) and facilitating condition (ß = 0.234). As hypothesized, perceived risk was negatively related (ß =-0.223) to intention to use indicating that users are concerned by the risk involved in filing taxes online. The regression results show that the four variables can explain 52.2% of the variation in intention to use which indicates good explanatory power. Understanding these factors can extend the knowledge, which can lead to better planning and implementation of e-Filing in Malaysia.

New Organisational Culture for New Public E-Procurement

Effective e-government involves rethinking organizations and processes, and changing behavior so that public services are delivered more efficiently to the people who need to use them. But the nature of the public sector is not a simple one. Lots of variables have to be considered: the number of entities involved in public sector procurement, the complexity of relationships among them, historical events that impacted on the public sector and different tensions between central and local parts of the public sector. In general, the most striking feature is the sheer complexity of the public sector. In the author’s opinion, it required a reconceptualisation of market exchange, evolving the procurement scenario from competition to collaboration. Nowadays public (e) procurement is still an under-researched area which has not spread out yet. Therefore, the aim of the chapter is to conduct a reflection to identify the features of purchasing and supply in the public sector and its further developments toward forms of collaboration and group purchasing.

Design of an Open Platform for Collective Voting through EDNI on the Internet

The present chapter aims to introduce the construction of a generic platform and open secure voting and multipurpose for the realm of the Internet. This platform will allow for collecting signatures and supporting multiple contexts through the use of electronic IDs and digital certificates. Potential applications of this platform are almost endless but some of the most significant may be: Voting at shareholders meetings, and votes in communities of neighbors, collect signatures, collect signatures for nominations, proposals for ILP (Popular Legislative initiatives), any activity susceptible to need a platform for reliable vote, meetings of parents, collegiate, et cetera. Currently the use of e-government for the identification of persons through digital documents is on rise, and the possibilities it presents are endless. That is why this chapter provides solutions for allowing these uses; it is of general interest for the present society.

Electronic Procurement (E-Procurement) Implementation in Municipalities

Local authorities or municipalities have different organizational structure and goals and as such implementing a customized information systems project requires a separate evaluation that would fit their needs. In the case of an electronic procurement (e-procurement) system, the implementation of this project at the central government level is not without challenges. Similarly, at the local government level, issues prevailed. Thus, this chapter highlights the issues encountered by twelve local authorities in the state of Selangor, Malaysia. The issues are broken down into four themes, namely, political, economic, social, and technological. It is important to note that local authorities fall within the jurisdiction of the state government; thus, more issues are abound particularly with regards to political interference. Nonetheless, the ultimate goal of having an online public procurement system is a win-win situation for both the local authority concerned and the vendors or suppliers. Hence, identifying the issues and learning from them will limit project failures or extended scheduling. Inherently, the implications of lessons learned from others who have implemented an online public procurement system will provide valuable guidelines for other lagging municipalities, yet at the same time, the late implementers will benefit more as they are able to avoid the pitfalls made by their counterparts that embarked earlier. In fact, the late-comers tend to achieve better success rate and report a significant return of investment.

Implementing Authentication in an E-Procurement System

E-government can provide citizen with better and/or more convenient services as oppose to traditional government services. Using electronic approach in completing a procurement process opens up a lot of issues regarding security. Transparent nature of the process at hand is requiring a sophisticated security system. Unauthorized access or different intrusion types are presenting a legitimate threat. On the other hand, developing such system in a developing country as Serbia bears many difficulties. Some of them are legal obstacles, technical weaknesses, as well as human resistance towards change. The focus of this chapter lies on methods used to overcome those difficulties as well as provide a strong security system that will guarantee the protection of sensitive data.

Business Process Integration within Lightweight Semantic-Enabled Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture

In the last decade, the Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) market has been enormously raised, and the major vendors are trying to adapt their software to suit it. One important factor to be taken into consideration in such context is the support of internal and external business process integration. Service-oriented systems are offering reasonable business process integration support. However, they lack semantic definition of their service interfaces. The research presented in this chapter tries to solve this issue by proposing a lightweight semantic-enabled enterprise service-oriented framework where services can be semantically grouped based on the domains to which they belong. The proposed framework is merging both business processes and service orientation concepts to provide an agile and flexible enterprise solution that utilizes reusability, better quality, and faster time-to-market factors. This chapter will illustrate this framework, its goals, and outcomes, together with demonstration of a business case built on top of it.

The Benefits and Barriers of Electronic Public Procurement System

In almost every country, public procurements are the primary issue which citizens are the most sensitive to in terms of how public money is spent. Electronic procurement systems in the public sector have been adopted as a solution in order to respond to the sensitivity of citizens because of the benefits promised. In the early 2000s, Turkey both made the public procurement legislation approximate to the European Union standards and began to develop an e-procurement system within the scope of e-transformation Turkey project. As a result of the works carried out under the leadership of the Public Procurement Authority, which is an independent administrative authority, the e-procurement system started to be used in some stages of the procurement process. Four public hospitals were determined as pilot administrations in order to improve the implementation and it was aimed to make the implementation common in all sectors according to the experiences gained in this field. The objective of this chapter is to reveal benefits gained and barriers faced during the development process of the e-procurement by focusing on the above mentioned pilot implementation field. In order to attain this objective, the method of case study was adopted in this research, and guiding experiences were tried to be gained for the e-procurement implementations in the future.

E-Procurement

Although the implementation of e-auction events is not all that new, a current interest in understanding main issues involved in its implementation exists, especially in a business to business (B2B) environment. A clear will to classify and systematize the numerous variables directly or indirectly affecting e-auction suitability and final performance determination is evident also from previous conceptual literature contributions. Nevertheless a lack of empirical work in this field is evident. This work provides a contribution to the body of knowledge on critical factors impacting on e-Reverse Auctions (e-RA) performance in a B2B context. Based on an explorative factor analysis addressed to a panel of academic experts and practitioners, it aims at identifying the main factors affecting price and process performance in B2B e-RA.