An Assessment of the Effectiveness of United Nations’ Procurement Practices: The Case Study of United Nation Mission in Khartoum, Republic of Sudan

ABSTRACT Purpose; procurement practices for direct or production of goods has been a major element during the implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that has taken place since the late 1980s. However, procurement practices to indirect material suppliers were not usually included due to low transaction volumes, low product values and low strategic importance of these goods. Dedicated information systems for streamlining indirect goods supply chains have emerged since the late 1990s and subsequently have faced a broad diffusion in practice. The concept of these procurement practices has also been described broadly in the literature. However, studies on how companies use these procurement practices and what factors are critical to their implementation are only emerging. This research aims to explore the impact of procurement practices on operational effectiveness at UN mission in Sudan. The study was guided by the following objectives: To establish the role of purchase order and price determination of effectiveness and accuracy of need identification in the United Nations Mission in Sudan; To examine the effect of bid evaluation on transparency in the United Nation procurement section (Sudan); To determine the effect of supplier selection on accountability of the procures.; To establish the influence of proposal evaluation and signature authority on timeliness The research was principally descriptive involving both qualitative and quantitative techniques of data analysis. Simple random sampling techniques was the main techniques used to select respondents for the study, however some respondents were purposively selected and a total of 30 respondents participated in this study. The main instruments for data collection were basically questionnaires but also face to face interviews were conducted. Data collected using questionnaires and a structured interview guide was analyzed using frequency counts in form of percentages and was later tabulated to determine the relationship between variables.