eProcurement and Purchasing systems normally construct their employees into approved groups who are then enabled to go out and buy goods and services on behalf of their business. The issue is that not much analysis has been done on sorting out the good systems from the bad systems.

Purchasing systems organize their employees into groups who are authorized to purchase goods and services on behalf of their organization. The problem here is that not much formal investigation has been done on sorting out the good systems from the bad systems.

So what does one check for ? Well in this brief article I go into some of the key factors that you should consider I know this because I undertook the same exercise for my own organization.

Without getting too functionally specific, firstly look for a software company that has been around a longer than 2 or 3 years and has good technical support based in the country in which you are operating. This is most important unless you want to be placing support calls to India.

Look for low operational and training costs and also ask what are the fees to modify the software to your own specifications.

Find out how the software suppliers approach the required points for example if any custom built software is required do they send an analyst to sit with you or do they sub-contract to another company overseas that you have to relay your requirements to ?

Functionally speaking, purchasing software can contain is a focused set of tools, the specific functions you should be looking into are remote requisitioning, on-line approvals (multi-level), electronic creation/dispatch of a purchase order, goods receiving, 3-way invoice matching and accounts interfacing these are all the obvious areas.

Purchasing systems also contain some non-obvious tools what about facilities for say a supplier portal ? This is a more flexible approach than a punch-out application which is highly vendor specific, or providing a register of assets so that your capital goods do not have to be manually entered into your accounts for year end depreciation calculations.

You need to examine which metrics are available for you to measure the success and performance of your new eProcurement system !

When our company went through the exercise of selecting a new eProcurement system we zeroed in on a select few and finally wound up by choosing a system from Mikrofax eProcurement Solutions they met our overall criteria and seemed to have a detailed idea of what we were seeking. We also thought about systems from Sap, IBM and Oracle, all who had a deep understanding of the procurement system cycle but nevertheless rather missed the point from the small business perspective.

This of course by no means an fully extensive list of issues but rather a pointer to get you thinking along out-of-the box lines and help your business weather the current financial climate.

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