Malaysian SME employees accelerating into digital procurement usage during COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic is a wake-up call to businesses that were slow to adopt digital initiatives.This paper discusses Malaysian SMEs using digital procurement and the challenges posed by the COVID-19 outbreak to the SMEs.This paper examined the way employees behaved in conjunction with the digital procurement environment.Henceforth, this paper also examines how the Malaysian Government and the private sector are working together to address the procurement challenges.Hence, Malaysia is among the few countries that have introduced digital procurement to improve the economic well-being of local small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that have ventured into the digital economy.The benefit of this study is that the digital economy will help support long-term growth and generate jobs for SMEs in developing countries.This paper offers some recommendations to improve the Malaysian procurement system and outline an agenda for future research.