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 ...
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, ...
Build Back Younger?
Joe Biden's exhortation to 'build back better', which has also been used by Boris Johnson, is broadly equivalent to the more arch comment that Winston Churchill made during the war: "never let a good crisis go to waste."
Governments looking to reinvigorate their economies should consider their procurement spend as one of their critical tools. Governments typically ...
UK Government Launches Plans To Transform Procurement.
The UK government yesterday launched a green paper, a series of proposed changes to procurement rules, purporting to put transparency and increased community value at the centre of its new approach.
Certainly 2020 has seen the Government come under significant scrutiny in it's procurement processes, with a litany of ineffective contracts awarded in the emergency response to ...
More Governments Improve Transparency.
It is always encouraging to see government procurement transparency improving around the world.
Brazil and Cote d'Ivoire have both recently applied to the GPA, Agreement on Government Procurement, a plurilateral agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The agreement regulates the procurement of goods and services, based on the principles of openness, transparency and non-discrimination.
Adopting the GPA ...
Life in The Fast Lane
The NAO has just published a report criticising the Government for using a 'fast-lane', where suppliers that were known to MPs were prioritised for public contracts for protective equipment, often at high values.
It isn't hard to see why this is a problem. Good suppliers with a history of supplying PPE were overlooked in favour of suppliers ...
Adding Value
We're analysts.
We work with data, every day.
We know what works and what doesn't work.
We know about values that can't be summed, documents that are hard to find and buyers that use thirty or forty different versions of their name.
We build data points that can be used. Our work isn't just about gathering all the data we ...
Algorithms That Are Better Than Humans
Categorisation is about making it easier to find opportunities.
Getting it right means being better than humans.
For it be really useful, we have to be able to take source documents and, where necessary improve on the categorisation provided by the publisher.
If a publisher gives us a record that is classified as construction, that is useful, but if ...
Goodbye Defence Contracts Online
The Chief Commercial Officer of the Ministry of Defence has published details of planned changes to Defence Contracts Online. You can see his letter here.
The planned replacement, Defence Sourcing Portal, is due to go live in January 2021, with Defence Contracts Online closing at some point during the second quarter of 2021.
We will not lament the ...
The European Procurement Report. An Assessment
The data analysis from our recent report, An Assessment of European Procurement Around Covid, shows that the C-19 pandemic has affected procurement data across Europe.
Publishing volumes for procurement data are generally down and data on Covid-19 procurement appears incomplete in most countries except for France and the UK. This is likely owing to the circumstances of ...
European Procurement Around Covid-Our Data Analysis
Procurement data often uses CPV or Common Procurement Vocabulary codes as a classification of different notices.
In creating the Assessment of European Procurement Around Covid report, we were able to analyse Covid-19 data by identifying CPV codes commonly associated with Covid-19 tenders and contracts.
Although not all data publishers put CPV codes on notices, where notices do not ...
Review All Open Covid Contracts Here
In October, we openly published all the contracts let by the UK public sector around Covid.
In light of today's report by the National Audit Office on their Investigation into government procurement during the COVID-19 pandemic, we thought it useful to share our portal again, with all available published data on government contracts around Covid.
The table is ...
EU Government Procurement- Procedure Type
In our Assessment of European Procurement Around Covid report, we sought to determine the extent to which different countries relied on direct contract awards, those contracts that were let without any competitive process.
Research* has previously indicated that contracts that were let by direct awards are 10% more expensive than those let by competitive processes.
Direct awards are ...
New Covid Procurement Report Launches Today.
We are pleased today to launch our latest report, An Assessment of European Procurement Around Covid.
The first wave of Covid-19 in Spring 2020, brought about unprecedented stresses and challenges to modern public procurement systems. To remove barriers and ensure the fact procurement of critical goods, governments throughout European states implemented emergency procurement regulations. These regulations generally ...
Government Procurement Rises as UK Heads Back into Lockdown
Recently, we published a very important data set. All known government medical equipment and protective clothing contracts were published and can be found here. This data updates daily and is completely free for anyone who wants to monitor government contracts.
Since 12th October there has been a significant rise in the number of contracts for Covid related ...