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Social value has become an increasingly  critical feature of public procurement. The $13tn of global public procurement expenditure provides opportunities to meld policy and delivery in a pragmatic way. We have seen the Canadian government establish a preferential policy for minority owned businesses, something that has been a common feature of both US federal procurement and South ...

There is a famous quote about the fragility of knowledge by Donald Rumsfeld, the hawkish US Secretary of Defence during the Iraq war: "as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not ...

-Ian Makgill In my last post, I covered off framework agreements, and the advantages of using them for both government and suppliers.In this post I cover some of their less attractive features. Frameworks act to moderate the way in which buyers test a market, which is all well and good, but they do have some problems. They can suppress competition. If ...

-Ian Makgill Framework agreements are like umbrella agreements, and are usually made with a group of providers to supply a set of goods or services. The initial framework tends to be a broad agreement which sets out general requirements that must be met before a supplier is able to join the contract. They are designed to 'refine' ...

We're always pleased to see governments around the world improving their procurement processes, by broadening opportunities for all types of business to sell to them. This week, the Australian state of New South Wales announced a number of new initiatives as part of its ICT/Digital Sovereign Procurement Taskforce, that began midway through last year. The objective of ...

We are always pleased to see governments taking steps towards better procurement practices. Recently, the Canadian Government took a step forward for green procurement with Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) announcing an RFP for clean electricity to power operations in Alberta. This Clean Electricity Initiative aims to use 100% clean electricity by 2022, reducing greenhouse gas ...

With the Brexit transition period officially behind us, it's worth considering the potential impacts of Brexit on Government procurement into the future. While no one can guarantee what will happen, it is expected that demands for a commitment to better processes with greater transparency will continue. There are two international procurement arrangements in place for the UK, and ...

-Fiona Hunt As my colleague Ian wrote this week, governments are increasingly looking to procurement to deliver better social outcomes. President Biden began his term in office by implementing new rules in US government procurement around these very outcomes. These executive orders focus on local economic development and reducing carbon, both present significant challenges for the procurement ...

While 2020 was an incredibly rocky road for many businesses globally, in public procurement it was SMEs in particular who lost out, both in terms of number of government contracts awarded to SMEs and the value of those contracts. Worse still, this appears to be a trend in public procurement outside of the effects of Covid, ...

We recently completed a study of European government procurement changes in the three years up to and including 2020, to assess the impacts of Covid. In the process of our work, one area of focus has been a year on year calculation of the number of bids per tender, across all Europe. Analysing the data has highlighted ...

There is increased scrutiny for the suppliers of food boxes provided to the chronically ill and those asked to shelter through the Covid pandemic, and a number of high profile individuals have started to question the lack of quantity of goods and nutritional value within the 4,724,611 boxes that have been delivered through the food box ...

Yesterday defence Defence Minister Jeremy Quin announced a £550 million contract was awarded for new surge-attack missile The contract award promises 'hundreds of UK jobs' as well as 'unrivalled lethality' for the UK's lightening jets. “The development of this next-generation missile will allow us to protect our personnel and assets on the ground, from thousands of metres in ...

-Ian Makgill, Founder Spend Network Just before Christmas, DXC (formerly Hewlett Packard) was awarded a contract for £430,000 by the Business Services Organisation for on going support of EPES system, the rationale for the contract award was as follows: Without EPES the monthly annual payments to the independent contractors of some GBP 700 million per annum cannot be ...

Our New Solution To Classification In 2020, we developed an advanced classifier. This tool adds multiple labels to procurement notices based on the Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV), with an accuracy of 84%. This classifier gives notices five scored, Level 3 CPV codes based on their text and description, that work for the 90 languages in our database. ...