Concept of Operations of Procurement Engineering Management Support System

A software support system, called procurement engineering management support system (PeMSS), is currently under development through a joint research project. The procurement-related scenarios considered in this research is as follow: an EPC (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) company receives an EPC project contract and starts the project to deliver the agreed system to the acquirer. In order to acquire the required equipments that the EPC company does not produce by itself, it eventually interacts with subcontractors, also called vendors. The EPC company responsibilities during the procurement activities are twofold. First, the EPC company has to guarantee that it has ordered the equipment, through issuing Purchase Order (PO), based on the requirements stated in the contract. Second, the EPC company has to verify that the received equipment designs, called Vendor Print (VP), meet the specifications in the PO, before finally acquiring the equipments. During our survey study, we discovered that EPC company takes a lot of time and effort to create PO and verify VP, mainly because these activities are performed manually by the responsible engineers. Therefore, we intent to support the above activities by developing a support system to the legacy procurement system that can trace the requirements from the contract to the PO and VP, among other functionalities. At the time of the writing of this paper, PeMMS is still under-development, thus, in this paper we focus on presenting the development steps of PeMMS using systems engineering theory and introducing the PO creation function. Wholly, PeMSS attempts to reduce the time and effort of engineers on the procurements activities while also increasing the quality of the procurement outcomes.