E-Procurement: Reaching Out to Small and Medium Businesses

A main inhibitor to electronically extending supply chains is that large organizations and the majority of their smaller business partners have incompatible business systems. Big businesses’ sophisticated IT infrastructures support many kinds of information integration, manipulation, and reporting, whereas many small to medium businesses (SMBs) use IT only for simple clerical tasks. Big businesses will not be able to fully exploit their huge investments in internal integration capabilities until they can extend IT integration capabilities to the majority of their supply-chain partners.