Guidelines for designing a purchasing process for small businesses

The purpose with this paper is to contribute towards a deeper understanding of the purchasing process in SMEs. This is done by investigating general research regarding purchasing, business strategy and SMEs to create a framework of factors influencing purchasing processes in SMEs. The factors are then authenticated with an empirical study of an SME. It is concluded that all influencing factors from the framework can be applied to the SME, but that the SME tend to handle them with a short-term perspective. This paper will provide guidelines for SMEs in order to create purchasing processes with a long-term perspective, which is more integrated with their business strategy.