With the dismal economic situation hitting all sectors of all markets around the world, companies are looking to lower their procurement / purchasing costs ” For this they are turning to specialized eProcurement Software and electronic purchasing systems.

eProcurement systems organize your employees into authorized groups who are allowed to go out and purchase goods and services on behalf of their business. The issue here is that not much analysis has been done on sorting out the good systems from the poor 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 long time and has good technical support based in the country in which you are operating.

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

Find out how the software suppliers approach the required tasks ” for example if any custom software is required do they send a programmer to sit with you or do they sub-contract to a firm in India that you have to relay your hopes and wishes to ?

Functionally speaking, purchasing software can contain quite a focused set of tools, the specific functions you should be looking for are remote requisitioning, on-line multi-level approvals, obviously electronic creation and dispatch of a purchase order, goods receiving, invoice matching and interfacing with accounts ” 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 determine what metrics are available for you to measure the success and performance of your new eProcurement system !

When our business went through the exercise of selecting a new eProcurement system we concentrated on select ones and finally ended up by choosing a system from a company called Mikrofax eProcurement Solutions ” they met our criteria and seemed to have a good knowledge of what we required. We also considered systems from other companies like IBM and Oracle and Software Dynamics all who had an understanding of the procurement system cycle but nevertheless rather missed the point from a small company’s perspective.

The issues raised here are not a full 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 downturn.