This summer Aberdeen released its fourth “E-Procurement Benchmark Report”, E-Procurement 2.0, where Aberdeen found that like your local mail service, e-procurement steadily delivers.

According to the report, enterprises participating in the 2006 benchmark report that they:

• increased their spend under management by 36%
• reduced their requisition-to-order cycles by 75%
• reduced their requisition-to-order costs by 48%
• reduced their maverick spend by 36%

However, the report also found that there is tremendous opportunity for many procurement organizations to improve their performance as a significant gap exists between the Best-in-Class companies and the rest of the field. Specifically, best-in-class companies have the following significant advantages over all others:

• 28.6% improvement in spend compliance
• 90.9% improvement in spend under management
• 41.6% impact on requisition-to-order cycle-time
• 23.3% impact on requisition-to-order costs

There’s a lot of good information in this report, and I’d suggest you download a copy and read it if you haven’t already while it’s still sponsored. More over, the “Steps to Success” are dead-on.

Moreover, if you’re not employing e-procurement solutions, given the expected improvements outlined above, there is no absolutely no reason you shouldn’t be, especially since a funny thing happened since Aberdeen Group delivered its initial E-Procurement Benchmark Report in 1998: solution providers developed functionality effective, cost-efficient, and rapidly deployable e-procurement solutions and large, mid-size, and small enterprises utilized them to place more spend under management and ignite the transformation of their procurement organizations.