Discuss the advantages of e-procurement to both buyers and sellers. What are the disadvantages?
Many businesses outsource certain functions to save costs. For example, your university may contract with Barnes & Noble to run its bookstore or Aramark for its foodservice. One teaching hospital in New York outsourced its coding and billing service for just one department and saved $1.35 million on billing services. The hospital might not have saved that much if it hadn't used Med Pricer's e-sourcing platform to find the right supplier at the right cost for the job. E-sourcing, or e-procurement, is changing the way buyers and sellers do business. However, e-sourcing and reverse e-auctions are old news. The new kid on the block is mobile procurement, which offers a cloud-based platform that reduces the search, order, and approval cycle and offers analytics-on-the go. Most large companies have adopted some form of e-sourcing, and a recent study found that 30 percent plan to adopt mobile procurement and supply chain function mobile applications within the next year.