According to new report from FutureGov Research, from the 69 government finance heads from across The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 45% still struggle with paper-based procurement and 19% declared that they were still evaluating their options.
When finance heads were asked to explain the biggest challenge to implementing e-procurement at their agency, only 13.5% cited cost. Instead, bureaucracy and a general resistance to change were cited by 51% of respondents.
Finance heads indicated that senior management was overwhelmingly supportive of moves to e-procurement, highlighting nevertheless the challenge of changing deeply ingrained procurement processes.
The report also adds that one Indonesian finance chief explained that enforcing new procurement practices was hard enough in his own agencys headquarters, and impossible for remote offices throughout the rest of the country.
Finally, the study points out that few civil servants saw e-procurement as a platform for cost-savings. Instead transparency (38%) and speed of transaction (32%) were most frequently cited as drivers for procurement change.
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