Procurement strategy in the SMEs business to business relationship

Abstract

SME industry had been acknowledged by the government as an important component for the creation of jobs and the backbone of economic development. Having a reliable and better operation process will benefit the SMEs in facing the uncertainty in the business environment. In conjunction with this, SMEs must have a proper implementation of a procurement strategy to make them sustainable in their operation. In this research, the researcher adopts the qualitative method and in-depth interview as a data collection approach. Data from the in-depth interview were analyzed to form findings and discussion. In this study, the saturation model was applied to determine the final number respondent of which five (5) SMEs has been selected based on the saturation principle. The results reveal that each SMEs in this study invest in considerable effort to develop their procurement strategy that suited to their organization objective and operation needs. This research also identifies a few similar challenges faced by SMEs in implementing the procurement strategy. This study offers as a preliminary finding on the procurement strategy research in SMEs which is not fully explored for the benefit of future study.