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Hungary’s Procurement Milestones Not Met

The European Commission has recently presented an assessment under the  procedure to Hungary that we covered recently here. The Commission found that, notwithstanding steps taken, there is still a continued risk to the EU budget given, that  remedial measures still need to be fulfilled. While reforms were supposedly underway, the Commission has advised that Hungary has still ...

Would You Risk Bad Data?

If you're lucky, poor data will only make you look inefficient, but if you're unlucky, it will make a real mess of your business. Building services on data means that you need to trust and understand the data you receive. To be sure that it is the best it can be, to know the weak points, and ...

Data and Public Procurement.

There are some good reasons for including procurement data in your alternative data strategy. Governments are big and getting bigger. Before the pandemic, they spent $13 Trillion per annum with their suppliers. They spend money on everything from aerospace to zoology. Most importantly, governments pump out millions of rows of data on what they want to purchase, what they ...

Ensuring Data Integrity.

Not all data is the same. It might have come from the same source, but how it gets treated is vital. If a data company doesn't have good data hygiene practices things can get messy very quickly, making it hard to understand the data or undermining your valuable analysis. Always know where the data came from ...

Govt Issues £4.2bn Tender To Update Legacy Services

Crown Commercial Services together with HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), have released a contract notice for the Digital and Legacy Application Services (DALAS) framework, with a purported value of up to £4.2 billion over four years. The DALAS framework intends to provide a strategic gateway to support the delivery of future application services and move HMRC toward ...

‘Unboxing’ £120 Million Of Public Spend

It may have been branded twice, but it seems nothing could save The Festival of Brexit, AKA Unboxed, from tanking in the public engagement stakes. With a target of 66 million punters, the series of events across 107 locations purportedly attracted a mere 240k attendees, although these figures were refuted by the festivals executive director  today, ...

Saab Voices Opposition To Canadian Gov Procurement

The Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) agency has begun negotiating the final terms of delivery with Lockheed on an order from the The Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) for 88 new fighters, as part of a phase out its current fleet under its Future Fighter Capability Project. However, Swedish jet maker Saab, who have also bid ...

Your Data, Your Rules

If your company is hiring data analysts, you need data. You don’t need a login to a website which restricts the queries that your analysts can run. That’s why we offer raw data, through an API or a via CSVs. We give you data for your database, so that your analysts can conduct the research they need, how ...

Life Moves Pretty Fast

We've been talking for a while about AI and possible impacts on procurement. We use AI in our own service to almost effortlessly categorise hundreds of millions of documents in dozens of languages. We can complete a task in around 6 hours that would take a team of six humans more than four years to complete. ...

Lessons Learned In Public Procurement

The National Audit office is working on a Lessons Learned report, highlighting opportunities for change in public procurement. Topics will include commercial and financial management, efficiency and savings and procurement and contract management. The government’s policy is to use competition as part of public sector procurement whenever possible as a way of improving efficiency through reducing costs, raising quality, and generating ...

Australian Government Covid Procurement Findings

As the world emerges from the pandemic, governments are reviewing their procurement of Covid related goods and services. The Australian Government tasked Professor Jane Halton, AO (Order of Australia) to lead an independent review into Australia’s COVID-19 vaccine and treatment procurements. Professor Halton is a well-respected and experienced leader in the health sector, with roles including former ...

Hungary Passes Transparency Bills.

Last week, Hungary's government passed the first two of 17 anti-corruption legislation bills, in a bid to avoid losing €7.5bn in financing from the EU. This comes after the condemnation by the European Parliament last month that Hungary is no longer a "full democracy" because of the “deliberate and systematic efforts of the Hungarian government” to undermine ...

Babcock Lands Polish Defence Contracts.

The UK Government has this week signed major major defence equipment agreements with Poland’s military capability. At the Zamość Military Base in Poland this week, UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Defence Mariusz Błaszczak signed an Air Defence Complex Weapons Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). This enables the UK and ...

New enRichMyData project offers innovative solutions for data enrichment

Several European and international organisations, covering large corporations, SMEs, research centres and universities, are joining forces to develop new methods and tools for effective and efficient management of data enrichment processes in the recently started project enRichMyData: Enabling Data Enrichment Pipelines for AI-driven Business Products and Services. The initiative is funded by the European Commission under the Horizon ...

£900k Government Fund To Help Charities Win Public Contracts.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) is running a Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) Contract Readiness Fund grant competition, inviting bids to co-design and deliver a programme that will enable the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sectors to increase its participation in public service procurement in England. The Contract Readiness Fund is worth ...

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