1st Case Study: Setting an Effective Procurement Practices for The Sourcing and Purchasing of Raw Materials and Services Current situation: You are the purchasing manager of a food production company (example pasta or tuna) based in Dammam. Your company has a medium size factory in Dammam. Your company source most of the raw materials for production from 10 different local suppliers in Jeddah and sometimes also import some materials from 20 global suppliers using sea shipping via Dammam Port. Your products are sold in all cities in the Eastern region (Dammam, Jubail, Alahsa) as well as northern region (AlQassim, Hail and Tabuk). Your company has a small purchasing department that includes a purchasing manager, three purchasing agents and two administrative clerks. The contracting agreements with your suppliers are considerably different and sometimes are not recorded and monitoring properly. Also, the purchasing process with most suppliers is performed randomly based on personal decision-making of the agents who attempts to look for lowest costs without paying attention to other important factors. New situation: Your company decided to open a new production plant in Jeddah that will be twice as big as Dammams plant. The new plant will service Western region (Jeddah, Makkah, Taif). It is expected these changes would increase your operations and sales by 150-200%. Task: Youre are required to review the current purchasing process in your company and apply necessary improvements to set a proper procurement process and procedure for improved and reliable sourcing and purchasing of raw materials and services for both Jeddah and Riyadh production plants. You need to consider the following functions when considering the changes: 1. Setting a proper sourcing strategy for the suppliers 2. Setting a proper process and procedure for purchasing activities 3. Manpower of your procurement department including new hires, job responsibilities, required qualifications and training. 4. Setting a proper contracting and payment process and procedure for the contract management and payment of invoices with your suppliers 5. Technologies and systems to be used in your procurement department Your suggested changes need to be based on your understanding of the courses lectures and any online content that you find. Additionally, you need to search for relevant references on procurement strategy, procurement best practices, sourcing strategy and cite some relevant studies to substantiate and validate your recommended changes. You can make any logical assumptions and constraints in your suggested solution as long as you fully describe them and provide a good rationale for them