Title: Malaysian SME employees accelerating into digital procurement usage during COVID-19 pandemic

Authors: Kai Kit Soong

Addresses: Faculty of Accountancy, Finance and Business, Tunku Abdul Rahman University of Management and Technology, Malaysia

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic is a wake-up call to businesses that were slow to adopt digital initiatives. This paper discusses Malaysian SMEs using digital procurement and the challenges posed by the COVID-19 outbreak to the SMEs. This paper examined the way employees behaved in conjunction with the digital procurement environment. Henceforth, this paper also examines how the Malaysian Government and the private sector are working together to address the procurement challenges. Hence, Malaysia is among the few countries that have introduced digital procurement to improve the economic well-being of local small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that have ventured into the digital economy. The benefit of this study is that the digital economy will help support long-term growth and generate jobs for SMEs in developing countries. This paper offers some recommendations to improve the Malaysian procurement system and outline an agenda for future research.

Keywords: digital procurement; digital economy; COVID-19 pandemic.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPM.2025.143522

International Journal of Procurement Management, 2025 Vol.22 No.1, pp.1 - 21

Received: 06 Aug 2023
Accepted: 11 Aug 2023
Published online: 30 Dec 2024 *