How to Re-Engineer the Procurement Process Using the Value-AHP

The procurement process in logistics refers to all the activities necessary to ensure regular availability at the lowest cost in terms of time, place, quantity and quality of goods and services required by a production process. Here, we are referring to procurement as a multi-criteria decision making process for choosing the best product-supplier combination. In the digital age, e-procurement is well established in business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-government (B2G) but there still lacks a standardized digital framework for procurement. The general procurement model was effectively developed in the late ‘60s in a profoundly different context of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). In this paper, we propose an ICT oriented procurement model resulting from a partial re-engineering of the basic procurement process. Our model was obtained by merging the traditional frameworks buygrid and buying centre to provide a consistent choice of procurement alternatives in a multiplicity of Web solutions. The proposed procurement model was based on a ‘lean’ version of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) decision methodology called Value-Analytic Hierarchy Process, which provides practitioners with a quick and easy multi-criteria decision process.