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Nowadays, researchers, marketing managers, and business leaders are searching for innovative ways to exploit e-business technologies for business purposes (Aguiar-Costa & Grilo, 2015; Azadegan & Teich, 2010). These latest e-business technologies have changed the pace, speed, and way of communication in workplace. For example, e-procurement can conduct transactions within short time, manages business relationships among organizations, suppliers, retailers, and wholesalers’ efficiently and effectively (MohdNasrunMohdNawi, Roslan, & Harun, 2016; Bayazit, 2014; Kurnia, Choudrie, & Alzougool, 2015. E-procurement strives to lead better coordination and application of procurement resources to attain unified procurement operations culminated in enhancement of organizational performance (Howard, Vidgen, & Powell, 2010; Vaidyanathan & Devaraj, 2008; Vaidyanathan, Devaraj, & D'Arcy, 2012). E-procurement represents the communication and information technology which is being designed for facilitating the acquisition of products or raw materials by a commercial enterprise as well as governmental one through internet (Albano, Antellini Russo, & Zampino, 2015; Rahayu & Day, 2015). Traditional procurement process has may drawbacks such as time consuming, slow order processing, conventional process that contains many small and repetitive tasks, rigorous and unimportant paperwork for writing contracts, approvals, negotiations and bids (Gunasekaran, McGaughey, & Rai, 2009; Eskandarian, Marthandan, & Tehrani, 2016. On the other hand, the rule of success is if you save 5 percent of purchasing cost then it can increase your profit by 50 percent and reduce your overhead costs by 20 percent. A previous study has highlighted that traditional procurement is proved expenses because it is taking greater employee’s efforts, admin cost, plenty of ledgers, and time (Chan & Lee, 2003).
The basic objective to adopt e-procurement technology is to reduce transaction cost, increase the effectiveness in order placement, develop good connections with suppliers, reduce the level of paper work and time to order inventory, reducing the purchasing cycle and over-head cost that is linked with buying process (Aguiar-Costa & Grilo, 2015; Azadegan & Teich, 2010; Rahayu & Day, 2015). The study aims to use the concept of e-procurement in the capacity of an approach that guides to use the available stock of resources to expedite efficiency and maintain effectiveness in the domain of procurement and therefore helps to take over a competitive advantage reflected by better lead times, adopting cost effectiveness and customer satisfaction. For this study, efficiency means how the procurement procedures and processes are handles while effectiveness can define as utilization of resources to get maximum output. Efficient procurement can reduce the level of operational, procurement, and admin costs while effectiveness is more focused to gain competitive advantages. E-procurement is transforming the entire process of purchasing and provides all the prominent elements of purchasing process over the internet including the selection of suppliers, designing the products, negotiating instruments, collaboration, management of supply chain, evaluating the suppliers online, scheduling the product and supply of materials (Aman & Kasimin, 2011; Madhusudan & Rao, 2016; Neupane, Soar, & Yong, 2014). The idea behind e-procurement does not mean cut down the prices or negotiating with suppliers on reduced profits margin rather managing supply chain effectively (Gardenal, 2013). However, e-procurement system has also considerable drawbacks such as these are closed systems and did not facilitate the comparison as well as customized searches related to suppliers and vendors (Albrecht, Dean, & Hansen, 2005).