Research On The Web Services-Based E-Procurement Support System

An important function in production organization is the purchase of the goods and services needed to support the operation involved in fulfill customer orders. A typical firm spends at least 40%-60% of its revenues on external purchases of goods and services, so the selection of supplies and the control of material flows on day to day basis are central to the success of the enterprise. With the great mass favor of B2B ecommerce was begun again, e-procurement became an effectual purchase mode. B2B remodels completely the purchase mode of enterprise and enhances the efficiency of purchase and decrease the cost of transaction. Information technology has played an important role in e-procurement.However, the EDI-based or XML-based system can't support the real time and dynamic requirement of e-procurement. In each firm within a supply chain, it is common for production, marketing and engineering groups to continually update and improve their plans for the components and final products. In light of this, it is easy to see how no two locations in the chain will have the same set of complete data at any single point in time when data are transmitted and processed in batch mode.In this paper, we firstly present a Web Services-based e-procurement support system (WSEPSS) to support the real time and dynamic requirements of the expedited purchase, and describe its architecture and design, give the design of system and discuss the implication of using Web Services to enable real-time and dynamic processes. Then we put forward the mapping function and utility function. Finally we make an application of WSEPSS to illustrate how Web Services-based system can enhance procurement of the firms engaged in B2B procurement.