Effect of E-Procurement on Strategic Sourcing in Multinational Organizations in Pakistan

Abstract
The increasing pressure of competitiveness is affecting the sourcing practices of not only the business but also the multinational corporations. The practitioners, as well as the thinkers, are emphasizing upon proposing and assessing new methods of sourcing to sustain through the rein of competitiveness. It is evident from the relevant literature that the multinational corporations are at the cutting edge of changing their strategic and operational sourcing practices to keep themselves ahead of their competitors. Information and communication technology (ICT), in this regard, is reported among the most adopted interventions by the organizations, especially the multinational corporations. The technology interventions are giving new means to the classic organizational practices, such as transforming the procurement process to e procurement. Such transitions in the strategic sourcing practices of multinationals bring intrinsic and extrinsic effects as they not only call for the change in internal organizational processes, but also at the end of their suppliers and vendors. This study focuses on the effects of e-procurement on the strategic sourcing in the multinational corporations operating in Pakistan. This study follows the positivist philosophical guidelines and uses the deductive method to identify the effects of e-procurement on strategic sourcing. The instrument adopted from the work of Chipiro (2009) was adapted and used for collecting primary data. The self-administered questionnaire was sent to 500 supply chain management professionals working in the multinational corporations in Pakistan. 236 responses were received. 17 responses were discarded due to incomplete responses during the screening process, whereas, 219 responses were finally analyzed in SPSS. Correlation and regression analysis was performed to test the hypotheses. The results show a positive moderate to strong correlation between e procurement and strategic sourcing. It shows that a unit change in e-procurement results in 0.502 percent change in strategic sourcing which is moderate effect. The results, interpretation, discussion, conclusions, directions for future research and recommendations are also reported after the statistical analysis.
Description
Keywords
Citation
Collections