Track: Poster Competition

Abstract

Procurement as one of the activities in Supply Chain Management has recently received great attention from researchers due to it not just being a support function, but a key strategic tool for organizations to build their competitive advantage. Although the different stages that come under the purchasing process (such as initiation, planning and monitoring) have been studied in the literature extensively, they are done in isolation and not by taking the overall purchasing goal into consideration. This drawback and the inefficacy and ineffectiveness of the current purchasing practices are highlighted in the literature by several reports and research publications and they stress on the need to have better procurement practices to achieve savings of millions of dollars per year. Considering the inefficiency of the current fragmented approaches towards improving purchasing practices, this research aims to take a defragmented approach towards this strategic activity by including all of the key variables that affect the quality of purchasing into one single mathematical model. Using such an approach, the objective is to enlighten a buyer with the required information by which informed procurement decisions can be taken and transform him/her to a smart buyer. This mathematical approach towards purchasing will enable us to understand the key variables that affect purchasing, as well as their interdependencies and how they affect the level of a buyer’s smartness. The research will provide a smart buyer enabler framework towards improving purchasing practices in supply chains.