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There is a wooden box inside the doorway to Chinese University's business operations office.

For years, the office has used the box to collect written bids from suppliers for HK$100 million worth of tangible goods the New Territories university buys each year.

If some researchers in the university's engineering department have their way, this box, and others like, it will become obsolete.

David Yao and Houmin Yan said they started to build their 'e-jing'' electronic tender system, which was being given a commercial push by Chinese University's Centre for the Advancement of E-Commerce Technologies, about three years ago. Because of e-jing's ability to connect to backend enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and to enable every step of electronic commerce from procurement to payment, Mr Yao and Mr Yan compared their software with packages offered by multinational companies such as Oracle, i2 and Ariba.

The university was using the system to take bids from 400 of its 1,400 suppliers.

One electronics firm had L signed on to use e-jing and others were under negotiation, the developers said.

When students and researchers decided to develop e-jing, some competitors had not introduced their products and 'not that many people in Hong Kong were talking about B2B (business to business)'', Mr Yan said. 'In   stead of asking for government funds, we just started doing.''

Going through the fund-proposal process would have taken a year, he said.

Since May, 67 tender invitations have been posted online and about 30 bids have been received.

Initially, the system was used only for tenders which were worth HK$200,000 or more, though that restriction was removed and smaller bids would be taken electronically.

The university is so pleased with the system it planned to expand it to services tendering and to connect e-jing to its existing SAP-built ERP system later this year.

Mr Yao and Mr Yan said they wanted to sell the system to private firms, targeting small and medium-sized companies in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, at a price that was AAmuch less'' than for comparable systems.

The e-jing system enters the market when public sentiment towards electronic commerce is mixed, and companies are more cautious in their technology funding.

Several public failures of high-profile dotcoms a year ago, including Hong Kong's pharmaceutical market pacificrx.com, contributed to the caution.

Even with such closures, executives at other electronic software companies believed more trade in Asia eventually would take place over Internet-enabled networks.

Their only worry is the new markets being set up are likely to be private networks set up for a handful of large players, who would then use the market to  connect with a select group of customers or suppliers, much in the way Chinese University is with its hard-goods suppliers.

Concern about security is one reason why the trend in Asia will be towards private e-markets, according to a speech at the recent BusinessWeek e.biz conference.

Jaglish Bajaj, vice-president of operations and special projects at iMerchants, said one reason why the region's traders had yet to embrace the Internet was that software companies were promising too much transparency.

'In Asia, we are not that comfortable with transparency. How comfortable are we with a third party seeing all our information?'' he asked.

'What Asian enterprises are likely to do is take marketplaces in-house and make them less transparent.''

Grace Ma, director of marketing, Asia-Pacific, for CommerceOne said Japanese telephone giant NTT had set up an e-market that allowed business to be conducted between 60 buyers and suppliers.

CommerceOne provides software for NTT's e-market as well as 15 others in the region.

All 16 of the CommerceOne e-markets in the region are public, but Ms Ma said the trend towards private markets definitely was under way.

In all cases, the argument for putting the buying and selling process online was greater efficiency.

Patrick Yiu, senior finance manager at Chinese University business office, said the hope at Chinese University was the system would consume less paper and streamline the process.

Suppliers would no longer need to go to Sha Tin to place a paper form in the wooden box, and they would receive e-mail notification of tenders and be able to advertise on the university's e-jing tendering system, Mr Yiu said.

'They used to be knocking on the doors of all our departments to introduce themselves, and we have more than 300 departments,'' Mr Yiu said.

For now, paper tenders are still accepted by the university, so the box is not going away just yet, and Mr Yiu said that more time would be needed to tell if the electronic system was an improvement over a paper-based one.

Mr Bajaj said: 'Every (business-to-business)  initiative is always competing with a fax machine.''



University tendering system changes with the times