Research and validation

Procurement remains constrained by centralised digital architectures that increase administrative effort, limit transparency and complicate compliance management. This paper presents F-Procure: a decentralised, modular procurement framework organised into five layers: blockchain execution, smart contracts, ERP interoperability, AI-assisted analytics and compliance-aware governance. The framework is implemented as a minimum viable prototype on the Flare Network's Coston2 and Songbird test environments. Using small-scale, manually executed synthetic procurement scenarios, the study examines whether core stages — tender creation, sealed-bid commit–reveal, award and escrow — can be encoded in smart contracts and traced through verifiable on-chain audit trails. The paper concludes that F-Procure should be viewed as an early-stage reference architecture that suggests the potential feasibility of decentralised, compliance-aware procurement, while highlighting the need for larger-scale empirical evaluation.

An architecture brief describing F-Procure's five-layer model: evidence registration, policy controls, verification, exception analysis, and audit packaging — operating alongside existing ERP, sourcing, vendor-management, and contract-management systems.

A structured, three-stage pathway for evaluating F-Procure in an institutional environment: Evidence Discovery Workshop, Technical Feasibility Assessment, and Scoped Pilot — each with defined purposes, boundaries, and success criteria.