The process to get these materials is expensive for all companies. Often a person in a department has to order some material, he/she has to fill out a paper and go to the boss of the department. The boss of the department signs the paper and then the request goes to a company-wide order office. This order office waits a couple of days to get a certain quantity of the same items to order and get a discount in return. When the goods arrive the company has to distribute the materials and pay the bill. This takes a long time and too many person are involved.
E-Procurement has a different approach: Empower the employee. First the company typically gets one, two or more catalogues of products. The E-Procurement system sets rules for the ordering of products like the maximum value per order without approval, the number of orders exclusion of some products for certain employees (or groups) etc. E-Procurement uses work-flow technology. A rule might say an item with a price higher than X, the department boss has to sign the order. The employee orders the item and this triggers a signing request at the department's boss' desktop. The boss signs the order by simply accepting it. The E-Procurement system then sends the order message to the companywide procurement server which directly sends the order in a defined way (maybe ebXML compliant) to the supplier of the item. The supplier makes sure that the company gets the latest catalogue with the latest prices and conditions. With this electronic process an order of any item can be a matter of minutes until the order is in the supplier electronic system [16].