Factors that Influence the Adoption of Insourcing in Public Technical and Vocational Education and Training Institutes in Kiambu County

The wide range of products and services that are being sourced today have made the company’s procurement organization increasingly important function. Sourcing involves high level, often strategic decisions regarding which products or services will be provided internally and which will be provided by external supply-chain partners. The use of resources within the firm to provide products or services is referred to as insourcing while the use of supply chain partners to provide products or services is called outsourcing. The overall problem in this study was that despite the aim of Kenya as a country of achieving development through Vision 2030, technical institutions are still not responsive enough and simply lack a culture in which training is driven by realistic projections of future skill requirements. They therefore do not produce commodities for their own use and in case they do only in insignificant quantities. The purpose of this study was to determine the factors that influence the adoption of insourcing in public Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions in Kenya with special reference to Kiambu County. The main objectives were to examine the economic viability of producing desired items, availability of production capacity of technical institutions, governance structures used and lead time.
The study design was descriptive in nature with a target population composed of all technical departments, heads of institutions and officers in the procurement function. The target population was heterogeneous and therefore purposeful sampling technique was used to select the departments and simple random sampling was used to determine a sample size of fifty to represent the population. The study used open and closed questionnaires to collect data for the research. The data was analyzed using a computer program SPSS version 17. The study established that there was a lot of equipment in the workshops that lie idle and this could be used in making goods internally instead of buying together with cheap labour from trainees. The study recommended that public technical institutions should adopt insourcing which would help them save in the long run by utilizing their idle capacities as well as creating confidence to outside consumers that goods made are quality.