Using Open Source E-Commerce Platform for Public Sector Procurements

Abstract

E-commerce, in today's digitalized world, is changing the way shopping is done. Especially in the consumer market, suppliers and retailers have been heavily investing in and developing the e-commerce platforms and their user interface design, with the aim of making the shopping experience as convenient as possible. However, in the context of procurement, the systems and their user interfaces have not kept up with such rapid development. Using the traditional procurement applications can be labor intensive, and a more user-centric user interface could potentially improve the processes in procurements. Consequently, the background to this thesis derives from the idea of learning from the graphical user interfaces of B2C e-commerce platforms to improve public sector procurement in a Finnish health care organization. This thesis constitutes of three research objectives. First, the key factors of a graphical user interface of an e-commerce platform were identified based on prior literature. The second objective was to select a valid open source e-commerce application based on the selected evaluation criteria. The final objective was to evaluate, from the graphical user interface perspective, how well the selected application would meet the procurement related requirements of the client. In addition, in the evaluation phase, a set of key modifications were identified in order to improve the feasibility of the open source alternative for procurement use. The user interface of the selected application was evaluated with a usability testing technique: a test user – familiar with public-sector procurements in the health care sector – was given procurement tasks which followed the theoretical framework of the study. Applying qualitative methods, i.e. interviews, each task was then discussed with the test user, aiming to construct an understanding of how well the graphical user interface of the open source e-commerce platform suited the procurement related requirements of the test user. The main findings of the thesis argue that the selected open source e-commerce application has potential, in the graphical user interface perspective, to provide an alternative for the procurement platforms currently used in the organization which the test user works for. Furthermore, the thesis implies that there are clear similarities between the customer journey in e-commerce and in procurement, proving that the user centric elements in graphical user interfaces of e-commerce applications could be further introduced to the public sector procurement processes.