ABSTRACT
Advances in public procurement have been mirrored in the developments in e-procurement over the past two decades. Neef (2001) has suggested that ‘e-procurement means a giant leap forward in the long-sought-after development of the extended enterprise, where the supply chain becomes a continuous, uninterrupted process extending from buyer through selling partners’. Neef regards e-procurement as one of the major enablers for supply chain (or maybe better: value chain) management. Breite and Vanhantara (2001) go a step further and believe that ‘information technology changed the supply chain management concept more radically than any other technology’. McGuffog (2002) argued that
electronic business is necessary for future success, but far from sufficient by itself … it is an enabler for better joint processes across the value chain, for better collaboration supported by sharing structured data to support common objectives, and for better service and lower total cost through promoting speed and certainty of response.
