What technical or infrastructure-based obstacles should smaller companies looking to engage in e-procurement be aware of?
Hope: Let me first address the obstacles for smaller buying organizations. Some of the costs of implementing and licensing these applications versus the benefits that smaller companies can derive make the purchase of fully functional e-procurement applications from some of the more prominent vendors very questionable investments. This means that you won’t be able to get your money back out of it just because of the smaller volumes of indirect spending that some of the companies have. In terms of technical barriers that companies face, one of the primary ones for both suppliers, as well as buyers, is the whole series of problems that surround building and maintaining catalogs of product data. In order to build an information repository of goods or services, which your employees need to buy, you have to resolve some of the semantic and contextual differences in the product data description. There are no uniform standards that govern how products should be described or what the units of m
