A process framework for the flexible creation of procurement services

With the increased focus on optimizing procurement processes, different procurement concepts have been developed. However, for these concepts no widely accepted best practice solutions exist. Furthermore, customers often impose specific conditions on suppliers. Thus implementations of these concepts are always different. Consequently suppliers cannot provide standardized services (e.g. Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI), Just-in-time or Just-in-sequence) to their customers, but have to be able to flexibly adapt these services to additional requirements. To address this, we developed an adaptable framework that includes all basic processes of these different procurement concepts, but furthermore being usable for individual distinctions. Therefore the supplier can provide services in a very flexible way by constructing them from the basic process steps. If these steps are supported by information and communications technology (ICT), further implementation decisions have to be made. To enable suppliers and customers to create an integrated model that reflects the process as well as the ICT level, we developed a business process modeling approach.