Online auctions in industrial purchasing

High cost fractions for materials, which constitute up to 70% of the total cost of manufacture of a product, highlight the important role of purchasing in safeguarding the competitiveness of a company. The new information technologies are tentatively being put into use in purchasing. The new technologies, the Internet in particular, will help the purchasing department in various parts of the acquisition process to decisively reduce the acquisition cost of the materials to be purchased and the costs of the overall acquisition process. From electronic data interchange to the online auctions in the Internet, there is a wide variety of ways for using IT systems for acquisition.