Factors Influencing the Adoption of E-procurement for Public Sector Works in Sri Lanka: A Case Study Analysis.

Abstract

Public sector institutes inherently suffer from the information asymmetries, extra time and cost penalties, corruption, transparency issues, anti-competition, and too much documentation with utmost human interventions in traditional paper-based procurement practices. Recently, the Government of Sri Lanka induced public sector institutions to embrace electronic procurement (e-procurement) adoption for their procurement practices. E-procurement is revolutionary digitization of the public procurement process. Despite the potential benefits, a high percentage of public institutions as well as small and mediumscale construction companies in developing countries often slow to adopt e-procurement processes. However, its advanced applications are less prevalent even in developed countries. Hence, the study attempted to analyze the factors influencing the adoption of e-procurement for the public sector Works in Sri Lanka within the limitation of Works procurement practices of the XYZ public sector educational institute. A mixed method was used to carry out the research. At the outset, a detailed literature review was conducted and identified people, technology, internal organization, and external environment as key e-procurement adaptation variables. Moreover, three structured interviews accompanied to demystify the literature review findings concerning the Srilankan context. Finally, a detailed questionnaire survey was conducted among a population consist of 70 respondents by following the census procedure and 72.9% of them were responded. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data with the support of SPSS software. According to the overall result of the analysis, ‘Technology’ was realized as the most significant factor which considerably influenced e-procurement implementation for XYZ public sector institute in Sri Lanka.