How Do Procurement Networks Become Social? Design Principles Evaluation in a Heterogeneous Environment of Structured and Unstructured Interactions

Expanding procurement networks involving many countries, organizations and people impose challenges on procurement e-business systems. Firstly, the classic document ex-change based connection approach across company borderlines is still both time con-suming and costly. Secondly, today’s systems provide limited support for people net-working dimensions, combining structured and unstructured activities as part of the entire business process. We argue that the potential for accelerating the intra and inter firm procurement processes by addressing the challenges of integration and heteroge-neous activities is not sufficiently leveraged at present. In this paper, we present the re-sults of our design science research focusing on the evaluation of design principles along a software artifact, towards effects on procurement network performance