Title: Process evaluation of award of work contracts in a government department
Authors: Sidhartha S. Padhi, Pratap K.J. Mohapatra
Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, IIT Kharagpur, West Bengal 721 302, India. ' Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, IIT Kharagpur, West Bengal 721 302, India
Abstract: Government departments in India predominantly procure products and services following a manual procedure. The process is lengthy and it takes three months or more to finally award a contract. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the improvements that are possible to derive by adopting e-procurement. The procurement system followed for the award of a works contract by the Rural Development Department of the Orissa Government is taken here as a case. Discrete-event simulation is used to evaluate the system improvement in terms of reduction in lead time, and the proportion of contracts awarded out of the requested work-orders.
Keywords: work contracts; discrete-event simulation; India; e-procurement; electronic procurement; government departments.
International Journal of Electronic Governance, 2009 Vol.2 No.2/3, pp.118 - 130
Received: 01 Feb 2008
Accepted: 14 May 2009
Published online: 06 Nov 2009 *