Tcet erp

International Conference and Workshop on Emerging Trends in Technology (ICWET 2011) – TCET, Mumbai, India

761

E-Procurement for Increasing Business Process Agility D R Kalbande

Research Scholar (Tech.) Mumbai University, Mumbai.

+91-9820383928 k_dhananjay@yahoo.com

G T Thampi Principal,TSEC,

Mumbai University, Mumbai. +91-9969015439

gtthampi@yahoo.com

N T Deotale Dept. of Computer Engg.

LTCOE, Mumbai. +91-9869723420

emailtonilesh@indiatimes.com

ABSTRACT Today the business is changing rapidly over the period. Every

enterprise need to develop new service offerings and new technologies has to be adopted or reconfigured. Most of the service companies are tied with traditional project techniques, which include a staged approach. These stages need to be compressed and changed to meet time-to-market demands. Today every enterprise must be agile enough to respond with changing requirements of their customers. Agility has becomes the basic key attribute today as business faces uncertain and volatile environments.E-Procurement makes it possible to automate buying and selling over the internet. Typically an e-Procurement- enabled website will have product comparisons across vendors and various processes like tendering, auctioning, vendor management, and catalogue and contract management. High-end e-procurement solutions allow organizations to define their own processes in the form of workflows - thus utilizing concepts of business process modeling. In this paper we present the findings from a recent survey on e-procurement in India and explain how an e-procurement can be used in such fast growing organization to speed up the business activity at the suitable agility level and its impact on centralization and firm’s efficiency in the procurement process.

Categories and Subject Descriptors K.4.4 [Electronic Commerce ] :Electronic data interchange

(EDI) ; K.4.m Miscellaneous;

General Terms Management Keywords: Agility, e-procurement, ERP 1. INTRODUCTION In the business buzzword universe, flexibility and agility are often tossed around interchangeably. But the two are vastly different concepts when it comes to business processes and information technology systems. Agility, not flexibility, is key to business's ability to survive and thrive in today's competitive global

marketplace. A company that can quickly accommodate a new customer requiring XML ordering capability, for example, has process-level agility. A company that has many ways to complete a process and encourages their customers to specify their preferences and can deliver that customized experience has transaction-level agility. For example, customer who specifies they want to place their orders using XML1 , wants a bar-code label put on the box, an RFID2 tag on a certain type of pallet, and wants a paper invoice once a month with bulk billing is testing a company's transaction- level agility.Companies with low product diversity but strong competition in the market need to excel at process-level agility. Online bookstores, for example, offer largely the same products, so in order to differentiate themselves they need process-level agility to quickly adapt to whatever improvements become available that will help them ship orders faster/better/cheaper than their rivals.Now, more than ever, it is important for businesses to have agility at the process level because customers require it. And if they don't [have agility], their competitors will take a chance to downgrade.By contrast, companies competing in the electronics industry, where products are highly customized, are well served by building transaction-level agility to capitalize on new processes or technologies that allow them to offer greater levels of customization. Electronic procurement is defined as the sourcing of goods or services via electronic means, usually through the internet (Schoenherr and Tummala, 2007). Precursors of e-procurement can be seen as early as the 1980s, with the evolution of Material Requirements Planning (MRP3) systems into Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II) and then into Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in the mid-1990s. The practice of

1 XML was designed to transport and store data, with focus on what data is .

2 Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a generic term that is used to describe a system that transmits the identity (in the form of a unique serial number) of an object or person wirelessly, using radio waves. It's grouped under the broad category of automatic identification technologies.

3 Material Requirements Planning (MRP) enables you to plan material requirements for a manufacturing or procurement process.

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International Conference and Workshop on Emerging Trends in Technology (ICWET 2011) – TCET, Mumbai, India

762

Electronic procurement has gained popularity over the last ten years, and so has the research on this emerging area with an identity of its own. The e-procurement process supports the procurement and sourcing activities via Internet technologies and enables an efficient negotiation between buyers and vendors. Loosely describing the processes involved, e-procurement is the purchase and sale of products and services through the Internet using websites, as well as other information and networking systems. Typically, e-procurement web sites allow buyers and sellers facilitate their transactions. Depending on the business model, buyers or sellers may specify costs or invite bids. Transactions can be initiated and completed. E-procurement systems may make it possible to automate some buying and selling and thus cut down on transaction costs. Companies participating expect to be able to control parts inventories more effectively, reduce purchasing agent overhead, and improve manufacturing cycles. 2. EXISTING E-Procurement METHOD