A novel approach to measuring enterprise procurement decision process: an information distance perspective

ABSTRACT

Investigating from the production process, enterprise procurement is one most front-end activity, which is the precondition of other activities for an enterprise. Therefore, how to judge and compare scientifically different enterprise procurement decision processes is one of essential works to enhance management on procurement links and increase procurement efficiency. In this paper, enterprise procurement decision process is viewed as one information operation process that is composed of the links of information acquisition, transferring, processing, re-transferring and effecting, also the process of a series of transition of procurement decision information states. Thus, from an information distance perspective, we introduce the distance of information-state transition (DIT) theory and present a novel DIT-based measurement approach for enterprise procurement decision process. By classifying the Series and Parallel forms as well as 4 types of common structures of this process, we propose a useful systematic procedure to describe the operation process of procurement decision information qualitatively and measure enterprise procurement decision process quantitatively, through constructing DIT-based measurement models. Finally, a case study is implemented, thus verifying feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Enterprise modelling and integration
• procurement
• decision process
• information distance
• business process modelling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 61473311], [grant number 70901075]; the Natural Science Foundation of Beijing Municipality [grant number 9142017]; and Military projects funded by the Chinese Army [grant number 2016JJ06], [grant number 2018CX57].