Procurement Process and Supply Chain

Abstract

Organizations are operating in an environment which offers opportunities but also dangers, risks, changes, and challenges. To face these changes, organizations must develop effective strategies based on relationships with stakeholders and profit decisions, and cost-based in order to obtain competitive advantage. To satisfy customers' needs, the organizations seek a position of superiority over its competitors. To deploy its activities and to achieve its objectives, any organization must dispose resources such as material, human, financial, informational, and technological. This chapter treats a very interesting theme, that of procurement, as commercial activity, in the complex activities of organizations. The chapter starts with the literature in the field and presents the evolution of the process, the objectives, the roles, the functions, the activities, and the typology. The author presents the impact the new technologies have on procurement process, using a simulation model, based on mathematical and statistical models and IT programs.