Assessment on the Factors Impacting E-Procurement Adoption in Public Entities

Abstract

The adoption of the electronic procurement system in public entities is still low especially in developing countries like Tanzania regardless of the government efforts, directives, and regulations which require every public entity to adopt e-procurement. This study therefore, assessed the factors impacting e-procurement adoption among public institutions in Tanzania, Kigoma Municipal Council being a case; with three specific objectives namely to determine the influence of organisational, technological, and environmental characteristics in adoption of e-procurement. Mixed research approach employing embedded design was used where 50 respondents were selected as samples. Out of 50 distributed questionnaires; all were returned, and were used for data analysis. Both quantitative and qualitative data analysis namely ordinal logistic regression and content strategies were applied for data analysis. Three variables employed in this study seemed to have a strong positive influence to the e-procurement adoption from correlation analysis, from regression analysis the variables employed seem to have statistically significant while organisational characteristics seem to be the most predictor on e-procurement adoption, whereas descriptive analysis show that the majority agreed with all attributes of the variables that affecting the e-procurement adoption in public procuring entities Furthermore, findings indicated that organisational, technological, environmental characteristics have a strong positive relationship on the overall adoption of E-procurement. The study therefore recommends preparing a standardised training manual on e-procurement such as provision of training of induction to every new employee. This will help to build awareness among the employees and increase their efficiency. Also conducting regular in-house training to the staff associating to their field. Also, they The government should ensure that public entities adopt electronic procurement fully purposely for enjoying the benefits of e-procurement. In addition to that, public institutions should ensure that suppliers are well aware about the system and get to use it but also, they need to adopt it in their daily procurement practices