Electronic procurement solutions offer an additional opportunity to apply Internet technologies to streamline business processes. By adopting standard protocols and using the Web as a common platform, trading parties along an entire supply chain can coordinate their inter-company sourcing, order creation, and fulfillment activities. This approach, however, requires all participating partners to adopt one protocol standard. While this would streamline the business processes among trading partners who adhere to the same standard, it excludes many other global partners who may not use the same standard. Therefore, the ideal global solution for electronic procurement does not lie in setting a standard that forces every entity to agree on a single protocol, but rather in developing technological solutions that enable different entities to participate in the form that they feel most comfortable using.
Many business processes consist of a flow of information that controls a flow of materials.
Before the advent of electronic communications, both flows occurred in the physical world. Paper was the medium used to transform information content into concrete objects upon which people could act. Today, many companies are replacing paper documents with electronic transmissions to streamline their information flows, and consequently, their material flows. However, the efficiency of the total business process flow is not purely determined by the efficiency of information transmission. For optimal efficiency, the information must be received in a form that allows the receiver to access and act on it quickly.