Over the last several days, I’ve spoken with heads of Procurement from across diverse industries – retail, business services, construction materials, financial services. Each one was interested in learning more about the benefits of e-procurement, but each was also concerned that embarking on an eProcurement initiative would be a career-ending move, rather than a career-enhancing one.

Their primary fear was grounded in something they cannot directly control – adoption by end users spread across various locations. In their collective experience, employees avoid using the existing ERP or other procurement software modules because they are hard to use. User interfaces are not intuitive and require extensive training. Companies can hardly afford the change management processes required to consistently train new and existing employees on how to use the system. Which begs the question – why is adoption by end users so important in the first place? After all, don’t most companies have preferred suppliers and contracts already in place? Of course they do – but there is no way to ensure that employees are buying through preferred suppliers. Since existing software solutions are so difficult to use, employees are unable to find what they need and resort to maverick spend. Naturally, the hard fought savings are lost!

The adoption challenge didn’t stop there – they were concerned about effect on suppliers. How is it going to affect the way suppliers do business ? Will it affect the favorable pricing and processes set up with key suppliers?

Clearly, the success and failure of eProcurement initiative depends on adoption! The only way to ensure adoption is to pick a solution that is usable like other applications that we use daily – Google, iPhone. This will alleviate the need for user training and result in organic adoption. Lastly, suppliers should not be required to join a network or change their way of doing business.

Bottom line: eProcurement can indeed be career enhancing move – if done right!