Practitioners’ Perceptions on The Effect of E-Procurement Practices on The Performance of Public Procurement Management Units in Tanzania.

Abstract

The objective of this study was to assess practitioners’ perceptions on the effect of e-procurement practices on the performance of public procurement management units in Tanzania. Specifically, the study focused addressing four specific objectives (i) to examine the extent of the use of e-procurement practices in the public procuring entities in Tanzania (ii) to examine the effect of e-procurement practices on cost reduction in public procurement (iii) to assess the effect of e-procurement practices on time reduction in public procurement (iv) to ascertain the effect of e-procurement practices on internal customer satisfaction in public procurement. Cross-sectional case study design was adopted in this study. Questionnaire was used to capture quantitative data while interview method was used to capture qualitative data. These were supplemented by documentary review for capturing secondary information. Simple random sampling method was used to select respondents for questionnaires and purposive sampling method was used to select key informants for the interview. The quantitative data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics and inferential statistics; descriptive statistics were used to analyze distribution characteristics of variables and were presented in form of frequencies and percentages. Inferential statistics on the other hand employed Binary Logistics Regression Model to assess the effect of e-procurement practices on cost, time and customer’s satisfaction in public procurement which focused on specific objective two, three and four respectively in this study. Qualitative data were analyzed by using content analysis whereby data were transformed into categories, codes, frequency and percentages and then matched with the quantitative results. With regard to objective one, the findings indicate that there is high extent of using e-procurement practices among the entities with Medical Stores Department and Tanzania Revenues Authority leading. On cost reduction the results indicate that three out of four e-procurement practices are statistically significant (p<0.05). On time reduction, three out of four e-procurement practices are statistically significant (p<0.05). On customer satisfaction all e-procurement practices are statistically significant (p<0.05). The study concluded that e-procurement practices have significant effect on improving performance in public procurement. The study has made contributions in knowledge, theory and methodology. Finally, the study recommends that public entities in Tanzania should use e-procurement practices effectively to improve performance in public procurement.