Abstract:

In the contemporary world of business, procurement processes have been identified as one of the areas that can provide a sustainable competitive advantage to an organization. However, procurement process has been faced with a number of challenges hindering it from accomplishing this noble activity. This study therefore seeks to investigate the effect of these challenges to the competitiveness of an organization. The specific objectives of the study will be; first to evaluate the effect of  accountability on  organizational competitiveness, to find out how lean practices in procurement process enhance the organization competitiveness, to determine how ICT adoption in procurement process affects the organizational competitiveness of and to assess how ethics influences the procurement process for the organizational Competitiveness. This study will adopt a descriptive survey design with total target population of 266 employees and a sample of 160 employees in the selected hotels using both purposive and simple random sampling methods. The questionnaire will be the main data collection instrument and pilot study will be conducted to establish the validity and reliability of the instruments. A reliability of 0.7 will be considered adequate for the study. Data will be analyzed using descriptive statistics where the mean, frequency and percentage will be computed and inferential statistics where the Pearson’s correlation analysis, multiple regression will be computed and presented using frequency and percentage tables and charts. The study findings will be beneficial to the hotel management who will use the findings to improve on their operations, suppliers will benefit as the findings will assist in making the operations more efficient hence higher profitability, customers will benefit from more competitive prices since there will be reduced cost of operations and more accountability which leads to cost reduction, employees and the investors in the hotel industry.