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E-Procurement solutions have been widely available for almost 20 years now and we have seen them develop significantly A Little History In the late 90’s the indirect purchasing model was not supported by systems. Typically, there would be contracts and preferred suppliers, but it was very difficult to prevent maverick spend and non-compliance with policy. It was the early days of the internet and one of the early internet (or intranet) scenarios was to use a simplified browser-based interface to create purchase requisitions by selecting items from a more user-friendly list of items, which quickly became catalogues. The objective was to digitize the old paper based requisitioning system and drive compliance through an interface that the infrequent user could easily navigate. The interface was intended to require little training and to have a reduced set of functionalities to support very basic purchasing. Quickly after this, we saw the emergence of true e-procurement solut

My first job was as a developer, I was involved in the development of a mainframe purchasing system, which I later helped to replace with a package. That was my first exposure to a buy rather than build decision and since then I’ve seen both scenarios, although in the vast majority of cases buy beats build hands down. Of course, if there isn’t a package in the market that does what you need, then building your own system makes sense. Also, if your company has some secret sauce that is truly unique and special, then there is an argument to build. Whilst I was at a previous company, we developed our own WMS because we didn’t see anything commercially available that could easily be enhanced to contain our proprietary intellectual property, but that company is one of the largest distributors in the world, with some intelligent systems and some unique ways of doing things. For everything except the WMS, we used packages - I think that says something. Even with the capability and expert