Electronic Procurement Applications and Trends for the Food Service and Hospitality Industries

This book is a two-part study examining how the electronic purchasing landscape has shifted in the last eighteen months. First, a survey of 1,550 chain-restaurant and hotel executives from the 2002 Directory of Chain Restaurant Operators was conducted. Twenty-one questions were posed to them including the following: What types of applications do you use to purchase electronically? How is your spending distributed? How much did you spend on deployment? Who installed your application? How much time did you spend on training? What features have you deployed? Are you satisfied with your application? Answers to these questions not only assist those looking to use purchasing applications but also those that are developing applications. By seeing how much people are willing to spend in both time and money, the application development industry can tune their product parameters to meet the demand. In addition to the survey, twenty-two applications were reviewed. Provided are definitions of those involved including distributors, consortiums, and applications developers, both traditional and ASP model. From there ten application developers are reviewed based upon over fifty criteria that fall into ten categories. This is of great value to those that are attempting to select and purchase an e-procurement application. It is a comprehensive study of the strengths and weaknesses of each company as well as a complete look at every real player in the industry. The application developer will also find this research of value to determine where they play in reference to their competition.