Mihir A. Parikh and Kailash Joshi
Reducing purchasing costs remains an ongoing concern for most organizations. The standard purchasing process that works well for large purchases, however, generates…
Abstract
Purpose
Reducing purchasing costs remains an ongoing concern for most organizations. The standard purchasing process that works well for large purchases, however, generates proportionately much higher overhead and administrative costs for small purchases leading to purchase delays, high error rate, and poor vendor participation. There is a need to develop separate purchasing processes for small and large purchases and evaluate underlying factors that affect such process transformation. This paper aims to analyze a successful purchasing process transformation conducted at a utility company for small purchases.
Design/methodology/approach
It uses a case study methodology to examine the transformation in detail and understand related issues such as benefits realization, resistance to change, and risk management involved in such transformation projects.
Findings
It compares original and transformed purchasing processes and identifies resultant benefits to the company, participating vendors, banks, and employees. It finds that a company receives many operational, informational, and accounting benefits in addition to purchasing cost savings.
Practical implications
It provides guidelines for similar restructuring for small purchases in other organizations.
Originality/value
The paper offers a generic business process model for small purchases and employs equity‐implementation model to explain the factors leading to the success in this purchasing process transformation and possibly other similar organizational transformations.
Details
Keywords
This paper describes several problems with the current Internet technologies and the way they are currently utilized in education and proposes an innovative solution. First, the…
Abstract
This paper describes several problems with the current Internet technologies and the way they are currently utilized in education and proposes an innovative solution. First, the paper discusses an activity matrix that maps learning activities involved in business education along two dimensions: level of monitoring and level of interaction. The paper then proposes a unifying framework that utilizes emerging Internet technologies to support these learning activities. The framework goes beyond a simple piece of software at the client level to provide a complete solution with the student client, the instructor client and the server level software. Furthermore, the paper describes the architecture, features and specific technologies used in an actual education support system developed from the framework.