E-Procurement Best Practices

Secure upper management support. E-procurement has the greatest chance of success when it is promoted from the upper levels.

Identify appropriate supplies and suppliers. Successful e-procurement implementations require user adoption. You have to choose the suppliers your users buy from.

Create buyer consortiums. Colleges and universities can increase their negotiating power by creating shared e-procurement systems.

Demonstrate savings. Nothing convinces administrators and users that e-procurement is important like hard numbers.

Brand the e-procurement website. Iowa State (home of the Cyclones) has CyBuy on which to hang its internal marketing campaign, and it works.

Set adoption deadlines. You've got to cut the ties to old processes to make e-procurement work. Take baby steps at first, but eventually you have to enforce hard deadlines.

Outsource the e-procurement help desk. College IT staffs are spread too thin to deliver the constant and timely support necessary to keep users happy and keep them coming back to the system.