As in almost every field where business and technology collide, one unfortunate side effect always seems to be a super-proliferation of jargon - very often created by service providers to generate new 'spaces' which they can aspire to 'own'.

The result is invariably fragmentation and confusion; a glut of terms that come to mean different things to different people. So below, I have tried to give Wax Digital's round up of how we apply the most common terms:

»       eProcurement (or e-procurement): The umbrella or catch-all term for all electronic purchasing and sourcing activities.

»       Source-to-Pay: As above, but describes a little more accurately the entire eProcurement cycle, from sourcing right through to payment of a supplier invoice.

Below these two umbrella terms sit another couple of collective nouns:

»        eSourcing (or e-sourcing): Covers a range of activities and technologies specifically around the tender, auction and contract management lifecycle.

»        Purchase-to-Pay (P2P): Once suppliers are sourced and contracts in place, purchase-to-pay facilitates the electronic raising of requisitions through to payment of invoices.

eSourcing typically accommodates the following core activities:

»        eRFx (or electronic tendering): Creating tender documents electronically, distributing them to suppliers and collating the responses with automated score carding to identify the most suitable suppliers/best responses.

»        eAuction (or e-auction): Time-based events in which suppliers compete against one another for supply of a defined set of goods and/or services.

»        Contract management: Electronic negotiation, storage and ongoing management of supplier contract documents.

Purchase-to-Pay includes:

»        Product Data Management (electronic catalogues): Providing an environment for users to search and select products and services for purchase, typically with the facility for suppliers to manage and maintain that data.

»        Purchasing: Typically the business rules that are applied to requisitions – eg budgeting, approvals etc – that result in authorized and correctly coded purchase orders.

»        Electronic Document Interchange (EDI or web EDI): The technology for distributing purchase orders electronically, through goods receipting, returns etc, to final electronic invoice.

»        Invoice Matching: Workflow processes to handle invoice discrepancies, or to deal with invoices that are not submitted electronically by suppliers.

»        Spend Analysis: Analysing spend patterns across one or more systems in order to power more effective strategic sourcing activities.