The benefits and barriers of electronic public procurement system: A case study on public hospitals in Turkey

Abstract

In almost every country, public procurements are the primary issue which citizens are the most sensitive to in terms of how public money is spent. Electronic procurement systems in the public sector have been adopted as a solution in order to respond to the sensitivity of citizens because of the benefits promised. In the early 2000s, Turkey both made the public procurement legislation approximate to the European Union standards and began to develop an e-procurement system within the scope of e-transformation Turkey project. As a result of the works carried out under the leadership of the Public Procurement Authority, which is an independent administrative authority, the e-procurement system started to be used in some stages of the procurement process. Four public hospitals were determined as pilot administrations in order to improve the implementation and it was aimed to make the implementation common in all sectors according to the experiences gained in this field. The objective of this chapter is to reveal benefits gained and barriers faced during the development process of the e-procurement by focusing on the above mentioned pilot implementation field. In order to attain this objective, the method of case study was adopted in this research, and guiding experiences were tried to be gained for the e-procurement implementations in the future.