E-Procurement Gathers Speed: E-Procurement Brings the Experience of Amazon.com to the Purchase of Academic Supplies and Equipment-And It's about Time. (Technology)

Warger, Tom, University Business

After some spectacular false starts, e-procurement systems are off and running. In 2001, the collapse of Commonfind (after fewer than six months in operation) and demise of Simplexis (one of the first online purchasing companies to concentrate on higher education, acquired by PublicBuy) raised questions about the viability of massive online purchasing enterprises in the higher education marketplace. But other e-procurement systems products and application service providers have succeeded, and that success forecasts little short of a revolution in how colleges and universities will purchase goods and services in the future.

The dot-com bust and general recession of 2000-2001 gets some of the blame for what went wrong with e-procurement rollouts. Funding for new ventures, and confidence in new technologies fell with the economic downturn. And in some instances, suppliers had not come to the new endeavors with much enthusiasm, fearing that e-procurement was geared primarily to give buyers leverage against sellers. What's more, integrating the new online buying systems with existing campus financials systems proved to be more difficult than predicted. But let's face it: In general, the soft economy has led enterprises of all kinds to sharper questions about the return on investment for new IT ideas--and it's led them to defer adoption of those ideas when the business case is not compelling.

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Publication information: Article title: E-Procurement Gathers Speed: E-Procurement Brings the Experience of Amazon.com to the Purchase of Academic Supplies and Equipment-And It's about Time. (Technology). Contributors: Warger, Tom - Author. Magazine title: University Business. Volume: 5. Issue: 8 Publication date: October 2002. Page number: 63+. © 2009 Professional Media Group LLC. COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group.

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