Electronic procurement

Electronic procurement (전자조달/電子調達), or e-procurement, is the government-to-business (G2B, sometimes business-to-business or B2B) purchase and sale of supplies, work and services through the Internet as well as other information and networking systems, such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

To improve fairness, efficiency and transparency in the public procurement, the Korean government has conducted its procurement via the On-line E-Procurement System (나라장터) from the purchase of goods for administrative use to the contracts to build public buildings, and even to research papers for the administrative reform and improvement. The Government e-Procurement System has been operated better than expected, but some loopholes were found at the terminal users.

E-procurement constitutes a part of e-Government. E-procurement is done with a software application that includes features for supplier management and complex auctions. The new generation of e-procurement is now on-demand or a software-as-a-service (SaaS), i.e. vendors like SAP AG and Coupa have on-demand and SaaS offerings.

Key words
procurment, public sector, e-Government, G2B, value chain

Elements of e-Procurement
Elements of e-procurement include:
 * Request for Information;
 * Request for Proposal;
 * Request for Quotation;
 * RFx (the previous three together); and
 * eRFx (software for managing RFx projects).

e-Procurement in the Public Sector
Public sector organizations use e-procurement for contracts to achieve benefits such as increased efficiency and cost savings (faster and cheaper) in government procurement and improved transparency (to reduce corruption) in procurement services. E-procurement in the public sector has seen rapid growth in recent years.

E-procurement in the public sector is emerging internationally; initiatives have been implemented in Singapore, United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and European Union. Often, such e-procurement projects are part of the country’s larger e-Government efforts to better serve its citizens and businesses in the digital economy. For example, Singapore’s GeBIZ was implemented as one of the programmes under its e-Government masterplan.

Vendors
This field is populated by two types of vendors: big enterprise resource planning (ERP) providers which offer e-procurement as one of their services, and the more affordable services focused specifically of e-procurement.

e-Procurement Systems
An e-procurement system manages tenders through a web site. This can be accessed anywhere globally and has greatly improved the accessibility of tenders.

During the past few years, the Public Procurement Service (조달청/調達廳) was successful to export its e-Procurement systems to Viet Nam, Costarica, Mongolia, Tunesia, etc. This on-line government marketplace (나라장터) is shown through a Single Window.