£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. ...
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 ...
Visualise your data
Harness the power of procurement data to make informed decisions. Using our advanced analytics, we can create custom visualisations and dashboards for your team.
Whether you're building new insights for your own campaign or wanting to understand the nuts and bolts of your own procurement data, we can help you bring your data to life; from identifying ...
Clean and enrich your data
Cleanse all of the supplier records within your organisation, creating a single, consolidated record with rich information to help you make better buying decisions.
Match your suppliers to a single, company record;
show other buyers who trade with your suppliers and;
enrich your data with addresses, identifiers, company structures and more.
Classify your data
We have built a state-of-the-art algorithm just to categorise procurement data. Work with us to categorise millions of records with stunning accuracy automatically.
Classify any document type, including spending and contract data;
Classify multiple languages in a single process;
Real time classification for new data from multiple sources and;
use common standards like CPV or build ...
Analysis for the $13trn global market
If you need authoritative, evidence-based insight to apply to a broader strategic challenge, we're here to help.
Unlike other consultants, we start with the largest database of procurement data in the world and combine that with deep analytical insights and expert knowledge of public contracting, not just in the UK but globally.
Analyse competitive dynamics or contracting ...
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 ...