This chapter summarizes the research and its most important findings and also presents some implications for further research. Using semi-structured interviews this research aimed to identify reasons to; why have not more companies adopted procurement for indirect purchases; and how can procurement vendors make e-procurement more attractive for companies. The interviews were carried out to Finnish companies that did not have e-procurement solution for indirect materials in place during the time of the interviews.
While the benefits of e-procurement have been widely described in the academic literature, there are still major issues companies need to overcome before the benefits of e-procurement can be enjoyed. Based on the interviews, five factors that were preventing companies in adopting e-procurement for purchasing of indirect materials were found:
- Standardization issues and lack of flexibility - Scarcity of resources
- Low transaction volumes - Suppliers own portals - Integration issues
The results of this research are somewhat in line with earlier research (Angeles &
Nath 2007; Smart 2010) regarding e-procurement and its problems. The problems factors found in this research are related to the e-procurement solution itself (standardization issues and lack of flexibility, and integration issues), e-procurement solution vendors (Integration issues), suppliers (Integration issues and suppliers own portals) and also the buying organizations (scarcity of resources and low transaction volumes). For e-procurement solutions to be successful, vendors have to find ways of easing these problems and making the implementation process smoother for companies. The easiest ones to address for solution vendors are the ones that are related to the solution and to themselves. One of the companies interviewed, indentified that e-procurement solutions for indirect procurement were not yet on the level they expected them to be. They also commented that the solutions are still
developing and especially in Finland they are just only coming to the markets and into businesses awareness. If solution vendors can develop tools for making the integration of the solution to both, buyers’ IT infrastructure and to suppliers’
infrastructure easier, it could also have an impact to the problem factors related to buying organizations and suppliers. Those problems are hard for the solution vendors to impact directly, but when the solution is made easy to use and integrate, they could be affected as well.
4.1 Implications for future research
This research only included three companies and only from the Finnish markets.
While the Finnish markets for e-procurement solutions are still relatively young, one might need to include some companies from other countries as well and increase the sample size in order to get more accurate information about the problems related to e-procurement. Future research could also include the solution vendors’ perspective into the research and do some comparison between vendor and buyer perspectives.
There is also a possibility to study companies who have successfully implemented e-procurement and examine the problems they have had during the implementation process. Finally, another research direction could be supplier perspective and their willingness to adopt these technologies and the problems suppliers might come across when their buyers are adopting e-procurement solutions.
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