Procurement is an important aspect of the development process and plays an important aspect of nation building. Major portion of the budget of any organisation is planned for the procurement, every year. eProcurement has proven itself as one of the more effective and efficient tools for bringing good governance and transparency to the procurement process and initiatives in this field have received significant support from the donor community including the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Bank. Various initiatives have already taken place, spearheaded by different organisations to define best practices and strategies for the implementation and development of the eProcurement systems and many countries have already introduced eProcurement into their business practices through various business models and approaches. Legislation and political will also plays a very important role in the roll out of eProcurement. The implementation of an eProcurement system is not a short-term ICT project but a business process re-engineering project that should have a long term plan over 10 to 20 years period; it is not just a “quick-fix” system implementation plan. eProcurement requires the highest level of IT expertise. It requires the highest level of physical security, understanding of the procurement procedures, digital security, digital signatures, payment integration, delivery logistics, password protection with captcha, prevention against cyber attacks, backup policy, time stamping syncronisation, solution availability, high speed reliable data circuits and 24 x 7 x 365 secured, safe and reliable hosting environment with Tier IV or above green data centres. The book tries to cover all such aspects in details. The concept of digital marketplace has been discussed in great details. This was possible due to my discussions with many experts in their respective domain areas, who were all more than willing to share their wisdom with me at all levels.
