Eficiencia de los equipos de consumo eléctrico

It is fundamental to understand that electronic procurement is not a strategy itself but the use of electronic means to carry out the procurement process.

Through the e-procurement process, companies have the possibility to aggregate spending corporate-wide and take advantage of the purchasing agreements. Procurement activities can be grouped and defined in three different ways: indirect procurement, direct procurement and sourcing.

Indirect procurement involves selecting, buying and managing supplies for running the day to day of the company. Direct procurement may sometimes be called supply chain management and involves buying goods and organising activities to manufacture finished products, or products related to the core business of the company. Sourcing is the process of determining long-term demand requirements in goods or services, finding sources to fulfil those requirements, selecting suppliers to provide the requirements, negotiating the purchase agreements and managing the suppliers' subsequent performance, can apply to both indirect and direct procurement. It involves a four phase model: information, negotiation, settlement, and after sales.10

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public sector – Factsheet on latest developments in e-procurement in the EU and its Member States.

Before e-procurement started, organizational procurement process had remained similar for many years. The paper-based purchasing process involved the end-user of an item selecting the item by conducting a search and then filling in a paper requisition form that was sent to a buyer in the purchasing department, which originally caused delays in the process due to manager’s authorisation waiting time. After the authorisation, the buyer filled in an order form that was dispatched to the supplier. After the delivery of the item purchased, the item and the delivery note were reconciled with the order form and an invoice to be submitted to accounts payable department. Usually this whole process had a cycle time of five and a half days. By applying e-procurement this process can be optimised and the cycle time reduced to one and a half day. The process is changed in the buyer involvement, which is not required and by using the web as a searching tool makes it easier to find products than by using traditional catalogues. Though it is important to emphasise that this cycle time is for new item instead of a repeat buy for which searching would not be required. The overall result is large savings in time and expenses.

3.4 Benefits

Through e-procurement, the buyer achieves the target set out during the sourcing project which leads to lower transaction and processing costs and increases efficiency, for example greater speed in procuring services and goods and reduced spending due to increased choice and competition.

The private sector is often highlighted as the forerunner when it comes to adoption of new technologies and new methods of work. However, in the procurement field, including e- procurement, the public sector is probably well ahead of the private sector, such as auctioning transportation services, medical supplies and equipments for hospitals, among others.11

There are several ways that the private sector can benefit from the public sector’s e- procurement experiences as the needs of the public authorities are not much different

from the needs of private enterprises and in many cases the results of this work and standards could be used for Business to Business (B2B) e-procurement, through practices such as benchmarking.

Business-to-Business e-commerce has transformed the buying habits of the private sector, with companies of all sizes adjusting their strategic thinking to quicken turnaround times, and reduce costs, increase transparency and objective, keep inventory just-in-time, track orders, replenish consumables, anticipate the next requirement, upgrade systems and plan maintenance.

When e-procurement is combined with process reengineering it can greatly reduce transactional costs. In the traditional procurement process, there is a large freight of documents such as requisition, purchase order and invoice which gets prepared and transported within an organization and across organizations, administrative effort put into preparing these documents can be greatly reduced via e-procurement. There is a high cost involved in printing these documents and in transporting them both within and across an organization; the average of transaction cost in large organization is estimated in US$250.00 per transaction.

Practical example The transaction cost of $250.00 is due to manual handling and transportation of the invoices within the organization, due to issuing of a check or payment in connection to this invoice, for example. Though what makes this number appear large as it does is the unconformity of invoices, either because it shows wrong prices, quantities or there is no PO in connection with it. Through a purchasing system, the unconformities are minimised once this system is connected to the frame agreements (e-catalogue), showing the quantity agreed and the correct price. Once systems are matched and conform, the items are shipped and once delivery is conformed the integrated financial system issues the payment. This procedure is known as ‘Reverse Billing’ or ‘Buyer’s Invoice’, the actual supplier invoice is irrelevant for the payment and completion of this process as it was automated 100% automated and the quantity is diminished from the open PO the buyer has in its purchasing system.

When e-procurement is done, efficiency is obtained not just via reduced printing and transportation costs, but also via reduced process cycle time. E-procurement also tends to change the role of buyers in the purchasing department. By removing administrative tasks such as placing orders and reconciling deliveries and invoices with purchase orders, buyers can spend more time on value-adding activities. Such activities might include spending more time with key suppliers to improve product delivery and costs or analysis and control of purchasing behaviour, which can be named as contract management.

Another benefit of e-procurement is to obtain high quality data on purchasing activities, such as what has been bought, when, from which supplier and how much. Equipped with this data, companies are well positioned to negotiate better frame agreements with suppliers, to consolidate spend and reduce sub optimization.

E-procurement also enhances transparency and accountability in the purchasing process, making it a secure and transparent process by limiting maverick buying12, which is a great advantage for both procuring and procured companies.