Abstract
The government enacted the Act on Facilitation of Purchase of Small and Medium Enterprise-Manufactured Products and Support for Development of Their Markets, which obliged the direct buying of construction materials for public institutions. However, mandatory buyers proceeded without sufficient prearrangements with the public institutions. In field departments, these issues led to work problems caused by the rapidly increasing administrative workload, and many problems, such as defect treatment, were handled using the mandatory materials for small businesses. This study derived improvements for these processes and analyzed various problems in the field, employing a conventional survey following the enforcement of the Direct Buying System for construction materials. This study aimed to collect the issues of members of the government office through site visits, and these issues were classified into three levels (Level I: proceeding steps; Level II: major opinions; and Level III: detailed issues) according to three criteria: causes of occurrence, issue types, and work process. This study analyzed the importance of the opinions in the questionnaire survey. The major finding was that the manpower for handling purchasing was insufficient. This illustrates the problems caused by the strict enforcement of the Direct Buying System. This study suggests improvements based on the importance index.