E-procurement Implementation and Performance of Public Universities in Kenya

Abstract

Public universities are key in the provision of quality education. The study was aimed at establishing the enactment of electronic-procurement management practices amongst public universities. The first objective was to inaugurate extent of implementation of e-procurement management practices in public universities. The next goal was on establishing the consequence of e-procurement management practices on SC performance while the third objective was on establishing the barriers of e-procurement management practices in public universities in Kenya. The study adopted use of strategic choice theory and the resource based view theory in its theoretical framework. The study adopted use of descriptive statistics in its research methodology where firsthand data which was gathered by use of questionnaires from a population which was made up of the 31 public universities in Kenya. The study findings for objective one from the descriptive statistics showed that to a moderate extent all the five e-procurement administration practices had been implemented in public universities. For objective two, multiple regressions were carried out on the four SCP measures which were quality, cost, timeliness and responsiveness. The results ascertained that implementation of e-procurement management practices had a large impact on cost and reliability at 60%, quality affected by 43% and flexibility 47%. Hence there is affirmative relationship amongst implementation of e-procurement management practices and supply chain performance. In addition, the independent variables were generally significant since the p-values were less than 5% in all the ANOVA tables. Besides the results of the third objective indicate that public universities to a moderate extent experience challenges like resistance to change by staff, high costs of implementation of e-procurement ,high costs of training staff , inadequate technological infrastructure and lack of performance measurement systems .The study major limitation was that it was based on public universities in Kenya .There is need for a further research on e-procurement management practices on supply chain performance in other sectors other than the public universities.