Current e-commerce infrastructure and systems provide very weak support for electronic brokerage and negotiations. In this position paper and our initial work, we use procurement as the context of such functionality.
Procurement is one of the most important business functions.
The proportion of income dollars spent on purchasing, especially in highly mechanized mass-production industries, is relatively high. New networking technologies have the potential to radically change the way procurement is done. However, as was mentioned above, current e-commerce systems provide only very weak support for electronic brokerage. In the next couple of paragraphs we elaborate some more on the marketplace and infrastructure requirements and limitations. Following that, we will summarize a research project that addresses the functionality of component-based commerce in the context of procurement.