Elvis Khisa

Elvis Khisa MBA
University of Twente
Makerere University Business School

Elvis Khisa was a PhD student at the University of Twente (Enschede). He is still working at Makerere University Business School (Kampala) as head of the Department of Procurement and Logistics Management. The research, he was working on is: Developing a private industrial purchasing function in LDC's: The case of Uganda.

PhD Research
The study focuses on procurement practices in private manufacturing firms in LDC's with particular emphasis to Uganda. Given that over the last decade developing countries have put a lot of emphasis on public procurement at the expense of private procurement, the study aims at identifying the gaps in the development of the purchasing function in private manufacturing companies with a view of streamlining these operations and aligning them with overall firm objectives strategically to improve competitiveness in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

The study is calling for a paradigm shift of the purchasing function from the traditional operational/tactical nature to being perceived as a major strategic tool to professionalize the purchasing function and thus, make it a high value adding function through it's integration with the overall firm strategy.

In trying to do all this, the researcher will try to use four purchasing models available in the literature. The selected models are; The Michigan State University (MSU) Model, Kearney's House of Purchasing Model, The Van Weele Model and The Transaction Cost of Economics (TCE) model. The researcher will critically examine the applicability of these models by analyzing their various attributes with a view of helping private manufacturing firms to identify in which development stage they lie and suggest ways by which these firms can strategically achieve their purchasing goals. All the models generally stress a proactive strategy by all firms in order to enhance the management of the procurement development function to fundamentally improve on their efficiency to gain competitive advantage. This calls for top management's commitment, addressing people issues, organizational structure issues and issues to deal with companywide performance measures.