Determinants of Procurement Performance in Commercial Banks Within East Africa

Abstract

Procurement efficiency is the association that exists between planned and actual required resources needed to realize formulated goals and objectives as well as their related activities. The improvement of procurement performance would ensure that sourced firm materials are indeed procured during the right time at suitable cost. This would in turn enable improvements in organization procurement process leading to improvements on quality of offered products and services at minimum cost. The study pursued to find the determinants of procurement performance among commercial banks across East Africa. The study embraced a descriptive research design. The units of study were the 125 commercial banks in East African countries. The study collected primary data using questionnaires. Descriptive statistics aided in summarizing the results for each of the key variables. These included mean and standard deviation. Factor analysis helped isolate the underlying factors. The study found out that procurement planning secures the provision of right services to clients and reduces disputes during various purchasing assessment phases, fraud hampers optimal performance of the procurement department, aggregation of procurement influences the accomplishment of procurement functions, existing regulatory framework is instrumental to the attainment of optimal procurement performance, management of contracts have an influence on procurement performance and adherence to codes of conduct practices is imperative to attain desired procurement performance. The study concludes that ICT, right procurement skills and ethical practices positively affects the performance of procurement functions. The study recommends that commercial banks ought to create a procurement unit with skilled, qualified and knowledgeable workforces to head the procurement processes and commercial banks should work on having dependable dealers whose delivery schedules are accurate and within the bank’s turnaround time on supplies. Due to the veil of confidentiality surrounding banks most of respondents were reluctant to participate and due to their busy schedule most of the respondents had no time to participate in the study. There is a need for future research to replicate the findings employing multi-disciplinary measures of bank performance and wider coverage of procurement management.