The study investigated the implementation of procurement procedures in the King William’s Town Education District. In spite of the provisions of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act 108 of 1996 and Public Finance Management Act No 1 of 1999(PFMA), in respect of the provision of services, procurement in the King William’s Town Education District is flawed. The study explored the legislative framework governing procurement procedures in the District, the extent of compliance and non compliance with procurement procedures, and the causes of flawed procurement procedures. A descriptive case study was used to describe, analyse and interpret a particular phenomenon, in this case the procurement procedures in the King William’s Town Education District. Purposive sampling was chosen for this study to create an understanding of the research problem, and to complement the case study method in eliminating any potential bias in the data. Respondents included mainly the managers in the District, who are instrumental in the implementation of procurement processes in the District. Self administered interviewing schedules were used for respondents to answer without the assistance of the researcher. The study found out that the District was lagging behind in respect of compliance to procurement procedures, monitoring and evaluation, and accountability. Based on the above findings, the study recommended the following: (a) strengthening accountability in all managers and public servants, (b) professional training and education of personnel and managers in order to be able to implement procurement processes, (c) establishment of compliance office, (d) introduction of complaints mechanisms, and (e) effecting monitoring and control mechanisms.

Thesis (MTech (Business Administration in Project Management))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2019 / Communication forms an integral part of military management functions in safegaurding the territory and borders of the country through successful project execution. This explains cruciality and indispensability of communication in the military for effective management. Communication is not effective until intended recipient uderstand the message and be in a position to action required feedback, Akinnubi (2010:105). The research problem stems from structural impediments of communication that hampers procurement project execution. This study seeks to investigate the structural impediments of communication, bureaucratic systems and procurement as a strategy. The research exploited qualitative methodology, standards of social research techniques for sampling and methods of collecting data, through the administration of a questionnaire, direct observation, transcribing of qualitative data and document analysis. Project communication is measured by the extent in which results meets requirement and expectations of the clients. The researchers emphasizes that critical project information should be disseminated to project team members, timely for effective responds that propel project success. The target population for this research is 60 South African Navy Simon’s Town Procurement Service Centre (SPSC) employees, whom are entrusted with procurement responsibilities for the organization. The employees are the organizational representatives to different stake holders through communication mediums and channels. Communication over the years has become the centre diversification organizational study due to successful contribution for achieving organizational goals, when is correctly implemented and managed. The importance of communication enables organizational activity to be unified and serves as pillar upon inputs are fed to the systems to influence better decision making.

This thesis investigates how competition effects in government procurement auction are affected by the risk distribution between the procurer and the winning bidder. The risk distribution is linked to the conditions of payment which is assumed to be largely determined by the procurer. Thus, by investigating whether competition effects are different dependent on the risk distribution, this thesis contributes to the previous literature which almost exclusively model competition effects to be determined exogenous sources of uncertainty and characteristics of the market. There is a previous literature on the effects of various payment conditions in auctions but it mostly considers ex post moral hazard issues, and not effects on the competitive behavior at the bidding stage. An econometric analysis is conducted on auctions of infrastructure construction contracts held by the Swedish Transport Administration between 2010 and 2013. The results suggest that the choice of risk distribution can shift an auction from having no competition effects in bidding to strong bid-reducing competition effects. Seemingly, the procurer appears to face a trade-off between avoiding risk and enjoying bid-reducing competition effects. The difference in competition effects between contracts with fixed and more flexible payment conditions is found to increase with the auctioned project’s expected duration. In terms of government procurement policy, the results suggest that it can be cost-efficient for the procuring entity to share the risk with the contractor in risky projects instead of avoiding risk with fixed price contracts. Whilst this may contradict some common notions regarding government procurement, it is in line with the wide use of flexible payment conditions in private-sector procurement. Arguably, the recent decade’s increased ambitions regarding innovation and sustainability in government procurement adds even further weight to these policy considerations for the risk management of procurers.

The purpose of this thesis is to propose a standardization model for the purchase process of legal professional services leveraging e-Procurement and to validate the benefits brought by the implementation of both, an e-Procurement tool and a new procurement process. The hypotheses of this thesis are applicable to the procurement of legal professional services of large companies with a central legal department in charge of managing the relations with different legal firms (legal services suppliers). The information presented was gathered in a large global manufacturing company with strong presence in Europe. The procurement of legal professional services throughout the entire organization was analyzed and validated by central legal department based in the headquarters. An innovative model for the procurement of the legal services has been proposed based on different findings in the current literature. Also, a model developed by Ronchi et al. was leveraged to quantitatively measure the benefits brought by the implementation of e-Procurement. The model was implemented in the organization with the help of central purchasing and legal departments. The results showed it is possible to standardize the operative procurement of legal professional services for end-users to perceive the same process as the one used for direct purchases of office supplies. In order to accomplish this, some roles and an important transformation within the organization must be carried out. A general model to implement a comprehensive procurement process leveraging e-Procurement is presented in this study. The conclusions are that the specialized procurement literature focuses very little on service procurement standardization and even less in legal professional services or process standardization through e-Procurement, and thus this study and the model introduced might work as a starting point for professional practitioners or academic researchers alike. Further research topics are suggested at the end of this study to continue research on this topic.

Companies are no longer judged on financial performance alone, but rather on their “Triple-Bottom Line”, which accounts for social and environmental measures as well. This leads companies to investigate the sustainability of their operations and their products. Between the increasing cost of virgin raw materials and customers demanding post-consumer product content, manufacturers have begun looking at recycled material options. This paper addresses a procurement issue facing a polystyrene packaging manufacturer considering its optimal purchasing strategies between two suppliers – one providing virgin material, the other offering recycled material. A single-period scenario is modeled where each supplier sells product with a known yield distribution at market pricing. The manufacturer must choose whether to sole-source or dual-source, as well as determine how much material to purchase from each supplier to meet deterministic demand. Our results indicate that there is a range of prices from the recycled material supplier where dual-sourcing will lead to higher manufacturer profits compared to sole-sourcing. We show, based on the procurement strategy, the optimal quantities to purchase to maximize manufacturer’s expected profit. We then investigate the area of supplier development and how the manufacturer can improve their expected profit by investing in their supplier’s quality improvement effort. The questions addressed are how much the manufacturer would be willing to invest and how they ensure the proper return on their investment. This paper determines the expected increase in profit for the manufacturer from yield improvement projects at a supplier, which therefore becomes the upper threshold for investment. We also find that a company can err in their project acceptance criteria if they have an approval process that views project acceptance myopically rather than holistically. Lastly, we develop a systematic and comprehensive approach to the supplier selection process. We utilize the fundamental concepts behind W. Edwards Deming’s Plan-Do-Study-Act improvement cycle and apply them to the supplier selection process. We also present analytic and numerical study results that can be used in conjunction with contractual mechanisms to not only overcome issues such as free riding, but to also incentivize suppliers to engage in supplier development projects they may not have otherwise undertaken.

This dissertation examines an iterative multi-attribute auction for multi-unit procurement in the first part. A multi-unit allocation problem that allows order split among suppliers is formulated to improve the market efficiency. Suppliers are allowed to provide discriminative prices over units based on their marginal costs. A mechanism called Iterative Multiple-attribute Multiple-unit Reverse Auction (IMMRA) is proposed based on the assumption of the modified myopic best-response strategies. Numerical experiment results show that the IMMRA achieves market efficiency in most instances. The inefficiency occurs occasionally on the special cases when cost structures are significantly different among suppliers. Numerical results also show that the IMMRA results in lower buyer payments than the Vickrey-Clarke-Grove (VCG) payments in most cases. In the second part, two sequential auctions with the Vickrey-Clarke-Grove (VCG) mechanism are proposed for two buyers to purchase multiple units of an identical item. The invited suppliers are assumed to have capacity constraints of providing the required demands. Three research problems are raised for the analysis of the sequential auctions: the suppliers' expected payoff functions, the suppliers' bidding strategies in the first auction, and the buyers' procurement costs. Because of the intrinsic complexity of the problems, we limit our study to a duopoly market environment with two suppliers. Both suppliers’ dominant bidding strategies are theoretically derived. With numerical experiments, suppliers’ expected profits and buyers’ expected procurement costs are empirically analyzed.

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The character of Virginia's nonindustrial private forests is changing primarily for two reasons. First, many large, continuous forested tracts are being sub-divided, into with the resulting smaller tracts purchased for amenity values and recreation instead of as a timber investment (Hodge 1993). Second, the demographics of non-industrial private forest (NIPF) landowners are shifting away from an agricultural, rural focus to an urban oriented lifestyle and absentee ownership. These changes may mean less timber available for purchase by the forest industry. Timber that is sold will be on smaller parcels that is bound to have an impact on the procurement activities of forest industries. However, little research has been performed on the impacts of site and landowner characteristic on stumpage prices. The objective of this research project is to identify how the stumpage price of timber is altered by the characteristics associated with the changing forest: decreasing tract size, decreasing harvested volumes, landowner residence, and landowner harvesting preferences. In addition to the price of timber, the competitiveness of timber sales is analyzed to determine what impact the fragmented forest could have on the competitiveness of timber markets. To perform the study, site and landowner information was collected for 138 recent NIPF timber sales that occurred within central Virginia. This region is identified as a critical area for the study of forestry activities because of the growing urban and suburban residential populations and the large amount of forest industry activities taking place there. Results show that access to the site is the most important characteristic determining the selling price of timber. Sites that are easy for logging crews and vehicles to approach dramatically increase the price paid per ton. Tract size is less important in determining bid prices for timber either once the total volume harvested passes a minimum of 500 tons, or there is mature hardwood sawtimber on the site and the acreage is greater than 50 acres. Landowners preference for select cut harvests results in a lower price per ton being paid by the purchaser due to the increased logging costs associated with this type of harvesting. / Master of Science