Background

Supply chain integration is a prevailing issue of current research and influences the competitive advantage of companies significantly. However, construction industries are argued to be the least integrated supply chains of all due to their complexity. e-Procurement is one way to improve integration in a supply chain and has currently been implemented by some actors in the Swedish construction industry.

Purpose

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate outcomes achieved and challenges encountered when implementing e-Procurement in the Swedish construction industry in order to generate contributions to literature considering the detected research gaps.

Method

This study has been carried out according to an abductive approach given its flexibility to simultaneously review existing theory when analyzing the empirical findings. However, outcomes achieved and challenges encountered when implementing e-Procurement in the construction industry, in particular in Sweden, lacks considerably in scientific literature. Thus, an exploratory and qualitative study has been conducted in order to assess the phenomenon in a new light and generate knowledge. The empirical findings have been collected in a single holistic case study of a supply chain in the Swedish construction industry which recently has implemented e-Procurement. The empirical data emanates from semi-structured face-to-face interviews which have been conducted with nine respondents from five different organizations operating in the Swedish construction industry. The data has been analyzed using summarizing, categorizing and pattern matching.

Conclusions

The Swedish construction industry, at least the investigated supply chain, was and still is rather underdeveloped when it comes to electronic purchasing processes. However, the results of this study show that quite many outcomes and challenges with regard to e-Procurement are similar to other industries. Overall, 15 outcomes and five challenges have been detected for this supply chain. The implementation of e-Procurement in the Swedish construction industry faces positive conditions to be successful and has the potential to change routine working methods.