The role of quality in e-procurement performance: An empirical analysis

While the adoption and use of e-procurement has been prevalent in supply chain management, there is very little research examining the critical role of quality in this context. e-Procurement promises to cut operational costs all across the supply chain, but it also raises the expectations of buyers posing a challenge for buyer satisfaction and supply chain performance. Using the theoretical lens of Dynamic Capabilities Theory and Resource-Based View, we postulate that online information and process act as resources that result in logistics fulfillment capabilities. These capabilities in turn lead to satisfaction with e-procurement. We estimate our research model using structural equation modeling with survey data collected from 131 purchasing and procurement managers. We empirically examine these linkages by analyzing data collected from procurement managers. Our results indicate strong support for the relationships between information flow process quality, logistics fulfillment quality processes, and e-procurement satisfaction performance. One of the surprising findings of our study is that fulfilled order timeliness has a significantly greater impact on satisfaction than fulfilled order accuracy. This finding points to the increasingly important role that the dimension of time plays in today's competitive environment.