Development and implementation of online market place in MCMC e-procurement system

Abstract

In MCMC’s procurement sphere, all procurement purchases valued less than RM10k are being conducted using the Invitation of Quotation (IFQ) process. The nature of purchase is relatively low value and mostly is the off-shelf product available in the market. The expected cycle time to complete the procurement process below RM10k is within seven (7) working days upon receiving a complete purchase requisition approval and documentation required. Currently, amongst the main issue faced while conducting the process is the participation rate from the registered suppliers is not that prominent and less competitive proposal due to low-value purchases. There are also instances where there are only one (1) quotation received; thus, the comparative comparison is not able to be conducted to obtain the best value for money in procurement activities for MCMC. It is also observed that most low-value purchases are made on an ad-hoc / case-to-case basis. This mode of purchasing entailed multiple IFQ’s to be issued, and substantial manpower and time were needed to process them. Therefore the study on the introduction of the online marketplace in the IFQ process is expected to benefit the organisation in the form of shorter turnaround time with the reduction of a number of working days to process the purchase requisition, reduce manpower requirement, automation of the supplier recommendation based on the lowest quoted proposal and most importantly eliminate the need for Procurement Division to conduct similar sourcing activities tremendously. Mainly there are two different data source methods used for this research, i.e. quantitative and qualitative analysis, which involved surveys, interviews with various stakeholders and focus group discussion. The introduction of the online marketplace in the IFQ process is expected to benefit the organisation in the form of shorter turnaround time with the reduction of the number of working days to process the purchase requisition, reduce manpower requirement, automation of the supplier recommendation based on the lowest quoted proposal and most importantly eliminate the need for Procurement Division to conduct similar sourcing activities tremendously.