Archive

Missing Data Is A Known Unknown

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 ...

The Problem With Frameworks

-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 ...

Do Framework Agreements Have Value?

-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' ...

NSW Aims To Reserve Procurement Budgets For SMEs

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 ...

Canada Launches Green Procurement

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 ...

Post Brexit Procurement – What Will Change?

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 ...

Spending $400bn – A Demanding Task For Biden.

-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 ...

Where Are All The Small Businesses?

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, ...

Are UK, France and Germany Having a Competition Crisis?

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 ...

Controversial Food Box Contractors Face Scrutiny

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 ...

£550 Million Missile Contract Signed.

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 ...

Time To Build More Open Products For Government

-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 ...

New Year, New Tool. Introducing Our New Classifier.

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. ...
Pedestrians crossing a snowy street

The buyers that spoiled Christmas 2020

Welcome to our annual run down of the buyers that are most likely to spread misery for suppliers at Christmas. Here are the buyers that are publishing tenders that require a supplier to respond either in the last days before Christmas or within the first working week of January. This year, the British Council has pipped DEFRA ...
Envelope containing letter about Covid from Government

Why Blacklisting Is Harder Than You Think.

Sadly, we don't have to look far to find examples of suppliers being accused of illegality. The Grenfell enquiry heard evidence that suppliers sold products that they knew "were dangerous to life" . McKinsey is being asked by a parliamentary committee in South Africa to answer for payments made to a firm controlled by the Guptas, ...

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