When and when not, to do it yourself.
-By Alex Yeung
As a side hobby, I regularly cook. Apparently, it’s quite popular. It’s certainly lighter, less salty, less sugary, and saves a small fortune in eating out.
"You should sell this," regularly pops up in conversation. This led me to think, "let's see if I can scale up."
So, I set up a house party. Shopped around ...
First Look At NZ Government Procurement Enquiry Findings.
Earlier this year we shared the New Zealand Government's decision to improve its health procurement through a review process of Pharmac, the Crown entity that chooses medicines and pharmaceutical products for community and public hospitals.
A Review Committee was asked to consider how well Pharmac performed against its objectives and whether its performance could be improved. It ...
Machine Learning And Nudge Economics
Machine learning is seeping into our everyday lives, it powers our social feeds, our song recommendations, and our internet searches. It’s coming for your chatbots and the car you drive. Its potential to pervade business is obvious.
We wrote about our classification algorithm here, a tool that is forty-four thousand times faster than a human. Using machine ...
US Green Procurement Drive.
While on his campaign trail, Joe Biden guaranteed to use the federal government’s $500 billion-per-year buying power to “drive towards 100 percent tidy power as well as zero-emissions cars.”
Fast forward to earlier this month and President Biden signed an executive order that demonstrates how the United States will leverage its scale and procurement power to lead ...
From Ok,To Good, To Great.
We like a challenge.
That's why our goal is so clear and bold: to gather every public tender and contract in the world and make it freely and openly available.
But that's not all we do. When we get the data we also need to make it useful. It isn't enough to just present a document, it has ...
The Future Belongs To AI Powered Purchasing.
This week a respected Professor took to Twitter to criticise the government’s purchasing arrangements.
It was immediately clear what had happened, a supplier with what must have been the best overall catalogue of goods and prices had earned a place on a framework providing electrical equipment for schools. Their products were subsequently promoted by Crown Commercial Service ...
Consultancy Risks Government Contract Ban.
With £244 million in UK Government contracts won in the 12 months to March 2021, KPMG will no doubt be feeling the heat after receiving a letter from the Cabinet Office seeking assurances that there would be no further missteps after recent misconduct allegations.
KPMG risks being banned from bidding on government contracts altogether, should more concerning ...
The Buyers That Stole Christmas (Reprise)
It is that time of year again, where our halls are decked with holly, presents are under the tree, plans for a well earned break are definitely afoot. Yet despite this seasonal joy, a group of buyers have inexplicably decided to ruin Christmas for some of their suppliers by publishing tenders that need to be completed ...
8 things you need to run a supplier blacklist
The news that UK government will implement a new supplier blacklist, banning errant companies from winning contracts has raised the question of how to operate a bidding blacklist in public contracting.
Below we outline the 8 essentials things that a government needs to have in place to make a blacklist work.
A process that everyone can sign up ...
We Don’t Want Your Trust.
Not because we're shifty. We're not.
You don't have to trust us. Specifically, you don't have to trust our data.
If you have to trust us, that means you’re hitting and hoping. We get that you can’t know everything, but you will always know exactly what you’re getting from us.
So you don't need to trust us, you can ...
Intelligent Procurement Fraud Is Coming.
Are you ready for artificial intelligence fraud?
We've already written about the almost magical capabilities of artificial intelligence here.
We're using it to augment millions of documents. We're using it every day, creating cleansed, enhanced data that would take humans hundreds of years to process manually.
The latest natural language processing algorithms are completely changing our relationship with text. ...
What Do You Want To Predict?
Machine learning is changing the world.
Spend Network is already using machine learning to categorize all of our documents. The results are stunning. Hundreds of millions of documents can be labelled with highly accurate categorisations in a matter of hours.
Doing the same work manually would have taken 852 years.
Let that sink in.
An algorithm can enhance and augment ...
New Government IT Procurement Opportunities For Smaller Businesses.
The autumn budget included an announcement that HM Revenue and Customs will receive approximately £750m over the next three years to upgrade its technology infrastructure.
These funds include £468m in system improvements to defend against cyberattacks and modernise the tax system. Interestingly, £277m has been allocated to transform the way IT systems are procured. The spending review ...
Greek Defence Spends Billions On Cyber, Navy and Aerospace.
In early September, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis outlined major defence procurement plans as a way to overhaul its loss-making Greek defence industry and boost the country’s defence capabilities.
These procurement plans include a bid for new fighter aircraft, warships, and advanced weapons over the next 5 years. The French Government bid was successful in bidding for ...
Pressures Mounts On UK Procurement Processes
The UK Government has come under renewed pressure after being ordered to reveal the names of companies that were directly awarded significant contracts for the supply of PPE in a recent ruling from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
The Good Law Project (GLP), was the first to reveal what they term 'VIP' access, and they are challenging the DHSC over contracts awarded ...