Administrative and environmental benefits of public e-procurement

: evidence from Portugal

Abstract

E-business is the application of ICTs in some company’s operations to have simpler processes and flow of information. Among e-business practices, e-procurement is arising as a potential method to achieve lower costs and higher productivity goals. E-procurement indicates the use of electronic tools during each phase of the purchasing process. Recently, it has emerged as a prospect for efficiency gains also for the public administration. Implementing public e-procurement would generate savings and contribute to the efforts to consolidate public finances. Focusing on savings and environmental benefits, this thesis compares the paper-based public procurement with the electronic public procurement in Portugal. It portrays the findings of an exploratory research investigating the impacts of the adoption of the public e-procurement on the public administration. In addition, it attempts to estimate the amount of paper saved by electronic procurement and it presents the results of an empirical study addressing the relation between the administrative savings and the human resources’ quality and training.

Date of Award	29 Apr 2013
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Raffaele Conti (Supervisor)