E-procurement (electronic procurement, sometimes also known as supplier exchange) is the business-to-business or business-to-consumer or business-to-government purchase and sale of supplies, work, and services through the Internet as well as other information and networking systems, such as electronic data interchange and enterprise resource planning. The e-procurement value chain consists of indent management, e-Informing, e-Tendering, e-Auctioning, vendor management, catalogue management, purchase order integration, Order Status, Ship Notice, e-invoicing, e-payment, and contract management. Indent management is the workflow involved in the preparation of tenders. This part of the value chain is optional, with individual procuring departments defining their indenting process. In works procurement, administrative approval and technical sanction are obtained in electronic format. In goods procurement, indent generation activity is done online. The end result of the stage is taken as inputs for issuing the NIT. Elements of e-procurement include request for information, request for proposal, request for quotation, RFx (the previous three together), and eRFx (software for managing RFx projects). Alongside with increased use of e-procurement, needs for standardization arise. Currently, there is one globally developed open extensible markup language based standard framework built on a rich heritage of electronic business experience. It consists of five layers - messaging, registry and repository, collaboration protocol, core components and business processes. History It was first used by IBM in the year 2000, when the company launched its Replenishment Management System and Method, designed by Mexican communications engineer Daniel Delfín, who was then the procurement director at IBM's largest production plant, and programmed by Alberto Wario, an IT programmer. The system was designed to solve IBM's complex procurement process for the plant in Guadalajara, Mexico, then the largest personal computer production plant in the World, with a production value of 1.6 billion dollars a year. Three years after the system was implemented, the production of the plant grew to 3.6 billion dollars, after which, the company used the system in its secondary production plants, and later sold licenses to external companies around the World. Jari Tavi identified three stages in the evolution of e-procurement technology: initial systems were functional for procurement professionals but did not address user need; a second generation used web-based technology and aimed to support end-users as well as meeting procurement teams' needs but lacked flexibility and usability. The third system generation the secured more of the user-focussed flexibility and usability which had previously been lacking. In the European Union, e-procurement