Towards improving public procurement process through lean principles: A case of the agricultural engineering division, Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry, Namibia

Public administration is one of the major contracting bodies for Namibia's agricultural industry. This study makes a critical analysis of Namibia's public procurement process, based on a case study carried out at the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry. The research was done in three phase: direct discussion with the head of department and staff, document analysis and semi-structure interviews with stakeholders. A detailed study was carried out on a single procurement of a farm machine in order to value-stream map the public procurement process. Value stream mapping enabled the optimisation of the entire public procurement by reducing the number of sequential sub-processes from 19 steps in 48 weeks to 12 steps in 26 weeks and restructure the whole process.