A01 chaf6542 06 se fm indd

Procuring organisation

Payment to

customer

Invoice and

delivery note

Payment

Buyer

Approver

Originator

Accountant

Warehouse

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Part 2  Strategy and applications

E‑procurement should be directed at improving performance for each of the ‘five rights of 

purchasing’ (Baily et al., 1994), which are sourcing items:

1 

at the right price

2 

delivered at the right time

3 

of the right quality

4 

of the right quantity

5 

from the right source.

Box 7.1 gives an additional perspective on e‑purchasing.

E‑procurement

 is not new; there have been many attempts to automate the process 

of procurement for the buyer using 

electronic procurement systems (EPS)

, workflow 

systems and links with suppliers through EDI (Chapter 3). These involved online entry, 

authorisation and placing of orders using a combination of data entry forms, scanned doc‑

uments and  email‑  based workflow. It is convenient to refer to these as ‘ first‑  generation 

e‑procurement’.