Abstract
The railway transportation system plays an important role in the development of economies around the world. Railway infrastructure and transportation systems not only help with economic development activities but also make it easier to join countries and regions. The railway industry is expanding at an exponential rate around the world, and South Africa's rail sector is following suit. However, the deterioration of the railway infrastructure increases the cost of incidents and maintenance, the South African railway industry is unable to meet its obligations to shareholders.
South African railway companies are implementing several strategic projects aimed at expanding and modernizing the railway infrastructure. The majority of project delays are frequently attributed to the complexities associated with procurement processes and decisions. This research aimed to provide guidelines for aligning project processes and procurement activities. The main objectives were to identify best practices in railway infrastructure procurement processes. Furthermore, determine how these best practices align with South African best practices. This research obtained the processes of planning and conducting procurement from the literature.
The research methodology was informed by the literature review and the research approach was a case study. Questionnaire method was used to collect primary data using online google form platform. The study targeted a population of 50 South African railway engineering practitioners. The research used descriptive statistics which included the mean to determine central tendency, the Interquartile range(IQR) to determine the spread of data around the median, and the Relative importance index (RII) to determine items rated most important by the respondents. The last step used Cronbach’s Alpha to determine the reliability and internal consistency of the study data.
Recommendations from the case study findings include making improvements on managing make or buy analysis, defining contractual relationship between client and contractor, review and approval of project procurement plans when planning procurement. Furthermore, more improvements to be focused on considering contract administration, negotiation and awarding contracts and identifying and selecting potential suppliers. The limitation and challenge experienced in the current research was acquiring articles published in South Africa about project procurement
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management of railway infrastructure. The limitation related to the study design which was case study is that the findings cannot be generalized to another organisation because the study was conducted in one railway organization. Furthermore, another limitation is that there was no chance to directly interact with people who participated in the study to get an in-depth understanding of why they have answered the way they did. Therefore, the future research should consider looking at how these factors influence each other.