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Businesses worldwide are beginning to explore new areas of workplace change. Gone are the days of changing an element in one department and expecting results throughout the entire firm. The latest trend is the high performance work system. The implementation of such a system is not based around one department, but focuses on firm‐wide change. Key elements are workplace restructuring, retraining of workers and adding new technology. It has been found that by improving the flow of information through workplace redesign, using state of the art technology and empowering employees by training them to be daily decision makers, productivity and overall quality of production increases significantly. The implementation of a high performance work system can be risky and costly but the US Government is currently developing ways to aid companies so that they can take advantage of the benefits that can result from the implementation of such a successful system.

To explore the business‐to‐business purchase and sale of supplies and services over the internet.

A case‐based research approach is used to evaluate the internet commodities exchange (ICE) system for ABC Food Markets, the largest grocery chains in Western New York. Two surveys were conducted to measure ICE quality. The first survey was created and sent out to 27 venders. The second survey was performed for 14 department managers that were using the system.

A set of future recommendations for the ICE system has been constructed based on the surveys.

More data and information should be collected in any future research to investigate further the criteria developed in this paper.

The findings may be used to direct management teams in designing and implementing future generation of ICE.

The ICE system for ABC has been a technological breakthrough in the world of e‐procurement as a whole. Systems like ICE will be used in every business for all buying and selling purposes.