Abstract: Current corporate purchasing procedures are labor-intensive and therefore costly. The system enables an employee who needs an item which must be ordered from a supplier to select the item from an electronic catalog displayed on a personal computer and submit an order for approval and processing directly, by-passing both the normal paper approvals and the manual verification of the order by the organization's Purchasing department. It achieves this by means of an electronic catalog accessible from the employee's own personal computer, and a computer network and associated services linking the enterprise to one or more suppliers.