Ferguson Enterprises will make its maintenance, repair and operations parts and supplies inventory available to customers through iProcure.

Ferguson Enterprises (Newport News, Va.) will make its maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) parts and supplies inventory available to customers through iProcure, an electronic-commerce source for industrial procurement.

Ferguson joins existing iProcure suppliers WESCO Distribution, Applied Industrial Technologies and Fastenal Co., resulting in a network of suppliers with a combined inventory of more than 2 million industrial parts and supplies.

iProcure combines a catalog of industrial supplies with Web-based procurement applications. The network is already host to a large electronic customer base in the industrial parts and equipment market with more than 100 companies conducting procurement transactions, according to the company.

"More and more of our integrated customers are turning to the Internet for their procurement needs," said Fred Stapleford, manager of value-added services for Ferguson. "With iProcure, Ferguson can now streamline the otherwise complex and cumbersome task of ordering critical industrial supplies for entire manufacturing facilities. iProcure enables us to save our customers valuable time and money, ensuring that our customers have time to focus on their own business operations."

"Manufacturing companies are embracing automated procurement, but only if they are certain to access a comprehensive selection of parts from familiar, respectable suppliers," said David Monroe, senior analyst for Plant-Wide Research.

Monroe added that Ferguson and Datastream's other vendor partners allow iProcure's customer base to instantly reap the benefits of automated procurement.