Procurement transportation, inventory control, and service delivery in public primary schools in Embu county

Abstract

ABSTRACT Delivery of quality services to pupils in primary schools is key to developing their academic foundation. Poor service delivery in core functions such as transport, procurement, and inventory management generally undermine the quality-of-service delivery. The impact of procurement, transportation, and inventory control on service delivery in public primary schools in Embu County in Kenya was examined in the study. A total of 196 schools were sampled from 384 public primary schools in the study. 94% response was achieved with 184 questionnaires returned. Multivariate regression analysis model was employed in the research to assess the impact of transport, procurement and inventory control on service delivery. The findings of the study indicated that service delivery was influenced by the variables and accounted for 74.81% variance in service delivery (R² = 0.7481). The regression coefficient in the case of procurement was 2.312 (p = 0.005) and had strong positive relationship with service delivery. The transportation model showed that transport cost and delivery time had positive and negative effects on service delivery respectively. Transport cost had regression coefficient 1.011 (p = 0.001) while delivery time had a negative effect on reliability and productivity (β = -0.110, p = 0.001). Inventory management had positive effect on service delivery with regression coefficient 0.219 (p = 0.000) and had significant positive effect on service outcome. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that combined, procurement, transport, and inventory management accounted for significant percentage of variance in service delivery with F-statistic 40.98 (p = 0.002). The findings suggested that there should be improvement in procurement processes, transportation and effective inventory control to enhance service delivery in public primary schools. The study recommended increased efficiency in procurement, transportation system streamlining and inventory control to enhance service delivery in accordance with the findings. It further recommended increased use of technology and domestic capacity building to enhance the capacity of schools to manage operations challenges.