Understanding E-Procurement System Benefits using organisational Adoption Motivation Lens: a Case Study

Adoption of e-procurement systems and the likely benefits that organisations can achieve have been widely discussed. However, what still remains puzzling is the variation in benefits that organisations experience from the adoption of even the same e-procurement system. A few e-commerce scholars applied the factor-based approach to help explain difference in e-procurement benefits, but with limited success. In this paper, we propose an alternative theoretical framework (known as EPAMS) that draws inspirations from the notion of ‘organisational motivation’ for Inter-Organisational System (IOS) adoption context. Our framework relates organisational adoption motivations for eprocurement systems with three types of benefits. We further report the outcomes of analysing eprocurement benefits experience of a large municipality located in a state capital city of Australia. We explain the municipality’s attainment of e-procurement benefits in terms of motivation it had established for adopting the e-procurement system in the first place. The case study data provide preliminary support for our assertion of an association between an organisation’s e-procurement systems adoption motivation and the benefits these systems can offer. This finding has implications for the IS/e-commerce scholars and practitioners alike.