Survey on Benefits and Barriers of E-Procurement: Malaysian SMEs Perspective

Abstract

Procurement is one of the major aspects for an enterprise to improve its supply chain management and hence enterprise performance. The advent of Internet has introduced e-commerce and drastically changing the way procurement is done to improve operation efficiency and reduce transaction cost significantly. Thereby, this lead to the term 'e-procurement' or 'e-purchasing'. However, many Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) still perceive e-procurement as infeasible although e-procurement is introduced in the early 2000. Hence, this paper attempts to provide a comprehensive survey on existing literature with regards to the benefits and barriers of e-procurement in the perspective of Malaysian SMEs. Highlighting the benefits and identifying the major barriers of SMEs e-procurement implementation enables formation of effective solution to encourage more adoption of eprocurement system in Malaysian SMEs.