Blog
Creating Export Opportunities With Government Procurement Data
In today's global economy, export-oriented businesses face increasing competition and challenges in identifying the right markets and opportunities for their products and services. One source of information that can help...
AUKUS Defence Procurement Deal
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese joined the US President Joe Biden, and the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, in San Diego this week to announce the signing of a trilateral...
Australian Government Responds to COVID-19 Procurement Review
Many governments around the world have faced pressure regarding their procurement of COVID-19 treatments and vaccines, so it is encouraging to see The Australian Government releasing its response to the...
EU Joint Ammunition Procurement
EU ministers will meet today in Stockholm to decide whether to jointly procure ammunition to aid Ukraine and replenish domestic stockpiles. EU defence ministers will informally discuss plans to speed...
Denial Of Service By Wall Of Text
Clarkesworld Magazine is a publisher of science fiction short stories. They accept and pay for submissions from anyone. As of last week, they closed submissions due to an overwhelming influx...
Canadian Government Announces Rail Procurement Process
This week, the Canadian Government announced a major step in the procurement process for their High Frequency Rail project: the launch of the Request for Qualifications (RFQ). The purpose of...
Deduplication Routines
Deduplication is a deceptively complex problem to handle at scale. There’s a simple, ugly and brutal way to do it, where you compare two records and determine if they are...
Policy Proposal: Analysts In Place
Data is critical to the functioning of government. Policies and services live or die on the quality of data. Successes and failures can often be shaped by the decisions teams...
Hallucination As A Service
I asked Chat-GPT to find me some academic papers that highlight the usefulness of combining two different machine learning techniques. I hoped that it might be able to point me...
Future Trends in Government Procurement
Over the years, government procurement has undergone significant changes, with new trends emerging that are reshaping the way governments buy goods and services. One of the most notable trends in...
Making Your Own Export Platform?
If you are building your own export platform, sourcing, organising and analysing your data has its challenges. Here are some of the most common challenges we see: Finding The Right...
Tackling Modern Slavery in Supply Chains – Guidance
On 26 March 2020, the UK became the first country to publish a Government Modern Slavery Statement, setting out the steps government was taking to identify and prevent modern slavery...
Securing The Competitive Edge.
Are you an exporter looking for leads for your exporters? Do you want to help your in-country teams build more partnerships within their territories? Why not tap into our database...
The Benefits of Data Tech 101
Government procurement, the process by which government entities purchase goods, services and works from private businesses, is being revolutionised by the integration of data technology. The increase in data analytics...
EU Awards New Gas Aggregation Contract
In December 2022, EU energy ministers agreed to create a platform for the collective demand aggregation and joint procurement of gas, with a goal of providing up to 15% of...
Does Procurement Need Blockchain?
Blockchain is fundamentally a database, but rather than a database where one item is allowed to replace another, each change to the data is added as new record that is...
Mixing Politics & Procurement.
The need for administrations to act at pace is often at odds with the processes and procedures needed for good procurement. If an administration wants to send a man to...
Improve Your Exporting With Government Data
Government procurement data can be a valuable resource for export agencies looking to expand their business and identify new opportunities in foreign markets. By understanding the types of goods and...
Waiting For A Tsunami Of Text
In a world where text can be generated by an algorithm for negligible costs, we have to rethink how we value the written word. In procurement, the effort required to...
Cleaning Up On Cleaning Contracts
Canberra, in the Australian Capital Territory, is home to the nations houses of parliament and a large swathe of public sector. Transparency of public procurement has become an issue in...
New Procurement Bill Progresses Through Parliament
The proposed new Procurement Bill passed its second reading without division in the House of Commons yesterday, with the Government proposing the new bill will make it easier for small...
How Government Procurement Data Can Help Export Agencies
Government procurement data, the information on what goods and services government entities purchase in different markets, is an extremely valuable, and often underused tool for the export industry. Government data...
Government On Covid 19 Contracts
The government has published a document, providing further information about the procurement of critical testing equipment and services during the early months of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020.The document...
Global Analysis: Less Is Less
Analysing 7.5 million tender documents published by governments around the world has revealed a worrying trend of publishers providing less data for potential bidders. On average, the number of tender...
Using Data To Build A Supply Chain
All data has a provenance. It comes from somewhere. Someone created it. Maybe it came from a sensor, or it was created by a person using Excel. At some point...
Get Your Data Sorted.
We collect tens of thousands of documents every day. We visit more than 700 sources to collect this data. That's what our customers pay us for: the right data, in...
The Importance of Government Procurement Data for Export Agencies
There are a number of ways that government procurement data can help export agencies, including: Identifying New Markets - By understanding what goods and services are being procured by government...
Lord’s Have Their Say On Procurement Bill
The proposed changes to the Procurement Bill are on their third reading in the House of Lords. Last week the House of Lords defied ministers to back a series of...
Buyers who stole Christmas (again)
It’s time to shed a festive tear and feel some sympathy for all the bidding teams who’ve got bids to respond to during the Christmas break. So put on a...
How Government Procurement Data Can Help Export Agencies.
If you’re in the business of exporting, you know that the global market can be a tough one to crack. In order to be successful, you need to be strategic...
EU’s Ruling On Beneficial Ownership
Last week, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that public access to registries showing personal details about companies' beneficial owners infringes fundamental individual rights otherwise protected...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
‘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...
We Sell Data, Not Seats.
Why we sell data not seats? We're data analysts. We really understand the data we gather. We've been doing it for 15 years and we know what works and how...
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...
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...
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...
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....
Does Your Data Have 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
£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...
New EU Procurement Instrument Now Law.
About a year ago, we wrote an article on the new procurement instrument approved by the European Union. In recent weeks this long awaited change has become law. This International Procurement...
Blacklisting Gets Tested.
Back in June we wrote about blacklisting of suppliers and the Government’s intention to prevent poorly performing suppliers from bidding for government contracts. We mentioned the subject of Bain and...
UK Risks Its Place On Anti-Corruption Body
The UK has been placed ‘under review’ by the 77-country-strong Open Government Partnership (OGP) due to its failure to meet mandatory criteria for the two previous National Action Plans. These...
Thurrock Exposes Transparency Blind Spot
An investigation by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) into investments by Thurrock Borough Council has led to the resignation of the Council Leader and the Government has now stepped...
New Zealand Government Reviewing Procurement System.
It’s always encouraging when we see governments around the world looking to improve their procurement transparency and efficiency. The New Zealand Government has recently released a Cabinet report, outlining plans to reform...
Collecting Data For Sustainable Procurement In Construction
Over the last few weeks we have been looking at setting a sustainable procurement framework in the construction industry, and what kind of data is needed to assist with this...
Selecting Data For Sustainable Procurement In Construction
It is estimated that around 40-50% of natural resources are transformed into construction material, and that as much as 30% of all building materials delivered to a construction site end...
Setting A Sustainable Procurement Framework For Construction
When procuring construction projects, it can be useful to underpin sustainability criteria on existing policy and regulation. When assessing the enabling framework, it can be useful to identify, or consider...
Big Net Zero Contract Win For Small Cornish Business
A small Cornish company has purportedly won a £70bn contract to help deliver the country's transition to Net Zero. The Penzance based company called The Place Group has won a...
Supporting Sustainable Procurement In ICT
One of the key challenges of sustainably procuring ICT lies in the lack of transparency in supply chains. To overcome this challenge, an open dialogue has to be established with...
Why Is Sustainable Procurement Important For The ICT Sector?
The extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, use, and disposal of ICT products is associated with a number of environmental, social, and economic externalities. The extraction and disposal of minerals...
Shifts Towards Sustainable Sourcing
A while ago, we shared an article on findings by the Boston Consulting Group and the World Economic Forum that showed procurement is responsible for 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions, globally....
Supporting Sustainable Procurement In The Construction Industry
Construction projects are usually long and complex, involving the participation of different stakeholders throughout the different project stages. There are certain factors that are key to determine the sustainability of...
Why Is Open SPP Important In The Construction Sector?
The construction industry is estimated to account for 6% of global GDP, with Africa's construction market valued at around USD 5.4 billion in 2020 and LAC’s at USD 829.3 billion...
US Advances Equity And Economic Opportunity Through Procurement.
With the implementation of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Biden-Harris Administration set an objective to ensure federal investments built wealth and opportunity for underserved entrepreneurs and small business owners. One...
5 Reasons To Export To Government
If you want to grow exports, you should start with the largest and most transparent industry in the world, and here are five reasons why. 1. Public contracting accounts for...
Sustainable Public Procurement and Economic Development
What is it? For many industries contracting has become a global affair. Governments are rightly keen to gain economic advantages from a global economy but need to ensure that contracting...
Measuring Life Cycle Costing
In this article from the Sustainable Public Procurement Toolkit, we explain how you can use data to measure and monitor progress against the goal of promoting life cycle costing approaches...
Measuring Gender Inclusion
What Is Gender Inclusion Measurement? To reduce the barriers women-led businesses face in public procurement markets, we need to be able to identify women-led businesses and understand to what extent...
Measuring Carbon Reduction
What Is Carbon Reduction in Procurement About? Governments and companies are setting deadlines for achieving zero emissions. Public procurement can be used as a lever to drive change by promoting...
Measuring Sustainable Public Procurement
What is 'sustainable public procurement' uptake? Sustainable public procurement (SPP) uptake levels are about knowing how much sustainable public procurement is being relied on by public buyers, either during the...
Options For Data Use
There are different ways in which open data can be used to drive and measure progress against sustainability goals. So as part of the toolkit put together by Open Contracting...
Open Data & Measuring Progress
We believe all public procurement should be sustainable and open. Recently, with our partners Open Contracting and Public, we launched a new toolkit, to assist businesses with open data that...
Blacklisting Needs Kid Gloves
In the UK’s House of Lords debate on procurement reform, there was some forthright questioning within the government on whether Bain and Company, who had been found to have acted...
Bain’s Woes in RSA Raises Questions in Parliament
Last week in a Lords Chamber debate, Lord Peter Hain asked why Bain & Company were still able to bid for multi-million-pound UK contracts “when the company has recently been...
Procurement and impact
Governments spend over 13tn USD a year with their suppliers, or around 15% of global GDP. We’ve started analysing the carbon intensity of public procurement. It is uncertain how much...
Australian Pandemic PPE Contracts Cause Concern.
Much of the last two years have seen governments all over the world in a purchasing panic due to the pandemic. Understandably there has been an increase in direct award...
Goodbye KPIs, Hello Data Quality
There’s a truth to Tom Peter’s famous quote “what gets measured, gets done”. Peters was a writer and thinker on management practice who advocated the use of quality measures, today...
National Capital Authority Under Procurement Scrutiny
The National Capital Authority (NCA) was established in 1989 under the Australian Capital Territory (Planning and Land Management) Act 1988 (PALM Act) following the introduction of self-government to the Australian Capital Territory....
Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity Begins
A group of Indo-Pacific nations has banded together to begin the process of developing an Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity. This framework is intended to advance resilience, sustainability, inclusiveness, economic...
Stormy Times For Meteorological Procurement
The UK government faces trial in the High Court over its award of an £854 million contract for a new Meteorological Office IT system, according to the Financial Times. The...
UK Left Waiting On Transparency
The UK’s latest procurement bill promises much, but many of the technical details remain to be defined. The drafting of the procurement bill matches many of the trailed promises featured...
Empty Fishing Lakes.
We’ve written before about frameworks, but some improved analysis from our brilliant data team made us think it was time to revisit the issue. Using frameworks should lead to fewer...
Collaborative Procurement For The Construction Industry
The Centre for Built Britain has released a white paper on Procurement Strategies for incentivising collaborative delivery, which explores how a collaborative approach to procurement can help to deliver projects...
MoD £2 Billion in Nuclear Contracts.
Britain's Ministry of Defence announced this week that over £2 billion worth of defence contracts have been awarded to start the third phase of its submarine nuclear deterrent programme termed...
New Support For Canadian SME Traders.
The Government of Canada recently released its 2022 Federal Budget. Within it was an announcement of an intention to establish a Trade Remedy Counselling unit (TRC) to improve access to...
Progressive Procurement Yields Results
Last year, we shared the results of the landmark Aboriginal Procurement policy (APP), first introduced by Western Australia’s Premier, Mark MacGowan in 2018. The objective of the policy was to...
Cutting Carbon Is A Procurement Issue
Just a few months ago, we shared an article on findings by the Boston Consulting Group and the World Economic Forum that showed procurement is responsible for 15% of all greenhouse gas...
OECD: Promoting Gender Equality Through Procurement
COVID-19 showed that women have been disproportionately affected by the economic and social fallout from the pandemic(OECD, 2020[1]), as the pandemic exacerbated existing structural inequalities and gender norms (United Nations,...
Progress In The Open Government National Action Plan
We’ve been working closely with The Cabinet Office to develop and refine a robust and repeatable methodology for the identification and matching of tenders, as part of the Open Government...
Analysis Is A Service.
Understanding a market or a phenomenon has to account for when something happened. If you build an analysis that says 20% of records were published with missing data, the inevitable...
Consultants Still Winning Huge Government Contracts.
Consultancies have won contracts worth more than £700m from UK government in Covid related contracts since the start of the pandemic in 2020. Concerningly, many of the contracts were awarded...
Two Solutions To A Hard Problem
In our last post, I suggested that public procurement has a big problem: an inability to account for, or record failure. Today I’m going to suggest a possible solution. One...
Public Procurement Has A Big Problem
The world has changed. We live in a world where commerce, industry, and work are powered by data. Performance is measured and judgments on success and failure are often obvious...
Ukrainian Invasion & UK Procurement
Last week, the UK Government released a Procurement Policy Note (PPN) that sets out how contracting authorities can further cut ties with companies backed by the states of Russia and...
Aviation Procurement Inquiry
The Defence Committee, made up of a number of MP’s appointed by the House of Commons to examine the expenditure, administration, and policy of the Ministry of Defence and its...
Solving Search
Search is difficult. By that we mean building a service that delivers the right information to people who are searching for it. In our world of searching for business opportunities,...
EU Medical Procurement Recommendations
The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) has released a paper that examines procurement practices across the EU in their delivery of high-quality medicines for patients. The EFPIS represents...
You Can Shove Our Data……
Right into the heart of your business. That’s right, we want you to put our data in your own database. We don’t put our data behind a web page or...
Aus. Audit Office Taking Submissions
A few months ago we wrote about the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) investigation into the procurement practices of government-funded infrastructure. The ANAO has now launched a new inquiry into...
The Key To A $13trn Market Is Just A Login Away
Developers are a precious resource. You want them deployed on the most critical projects and for their time to be best used. But what if you had the data on...
Bad Data Is A Choice
You can’t run a good service on bad data. It doesn’t matter if you’re in government, a hedge fund or running a small charity. Today the information you need to...
Sole Beneficiary Of £250 Million contract
Crown Hosting Data Centres (CHDC) is likely to ‘win’ the government hosting framework contract worth up to £250 million. The UK Government's Cabinet Office will negotiate a new agreement for...
We Go The Extra Mile
With national, federal, and regional tender portals, it is easy to get an idea of the public procurement marketplace. But in truth, these are only scratching the surface of a...
When Language Fails You-Translating Global Data.
Our users enjoy access to all the key, live tender opportunities from around the world. We have hundreds of thousands of global, live contracts and tenders across over 100 languages...
Create A Bespoke Spend Category In Days.
When opening up most banking apps, it’s amazing how vague the transactional information is. How can you identify key savings in the broad-reaching ‘entertainment’ or ‘leisure’ bucket? How can you...
A Win-Win For Export Agencies
Endorsements are a win-win for export agencies. Exporters face new challenges, both in terms of increased barriers to trade following the pandemic, but they also struggle to meet the increasing...
Data As A Procurement Pipeline
There is a lot of procurement data out there, but it doesn’t always have reliable or consistent features. Data that's raw, unreliable, inconsistent, and scattered across different systems is hard...
Global Government Procurement Creates 15% Carbon Emissions
A recent report by the global business strategists Boston Consulting Group and the World Economic Forum has found global government procurement is responsible for 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Their...
What Biden’s Green Procurement Bill Means.
One of the first things President Biden did when he came into office was launch an executive order on green procurement. That is, he put requirements in place for all...
Government of Victoria’s Procurement Goes Digital
In November 2021, the Australian state Government of Victoria launched a digital strategy, which identified the frailties of the existing process for ICT procurement and offered strategies to simplify the...
UK Government Release Procurement Green Paper Findings
In December 2020, the UK Government Cabinet Office set out proposals for shaping the future of public procurement legislation with the publication of a Green Paper, Transforming Public Procurement.Preview (opens...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
South Korea Targets SME Growth Through Health Procurement
When selling to governments, SME's often have challenges with matching the buying power and supply chain strength of larger organisations. For the South Korean Central Government, the pandemic has proved...
List Of UK Tender Sources.
Our list of tender sources in the UK extends to over 180 individual publishers. If you use Spend Network you can access all of that data through one API call....
Canada Levels Up Procurement For Young Entrepreneurs.
Canadian not-for-profit organisation Futurpreneur, has partnered with the Canadian Aboriginal and Minority Supplier Council (CAMSC), on a project to diversify the Canadian Government supply chain. Futurpeneur is a not-for-profit organisation,...
Do You Have 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...
Delivery Guaranteed.
Our customers are the special ones. We make the bricks, they build the houses. They're the ones that make it easy to win contracts. They're the ones empowering SME businesses....
Contracting Emissions
We've launched a new analysis; the carbon emitted by the public sector's supply chain (scope three emissions). We're calling it Contracting Emissions. You can see our alpha dashboard here: https://spendnetwork.com/carbon/...
The Services Sector Opens Up
The WTO have announced a new agreement on the regulation of the services sector in over sixty countries. The deal ensures more transparency on regulation and certification of services companies....
Greece Spends €3 Billion in French Defence Deal.
A few weeks back, when the US, UK and Australian governments announced their surprise military pact, France wore the brunt of the new alliance, with the Australian Government subsequently scrapping...
UK Government £650 Billion Pipeline.
The UK Government has released plans for the investment of £650 billion of public and private cash into infrastructure projects across the country over the next decade under its new...
Contracting Emissions
We’ve built an analysis of carbon emissions by contract. Our team has shown some real dedication to get this far with the work. There’s still a long way to go....
You Don’t Care About Open Data.
We only charge for commercial use of our data. Non commercial users get it for free. That means that our data is open. If you're a business you probably don't...
Zombie Tenders On The Rise
Across Europe, the number of single bid tenders that only receive one bid continues to grow. Despite the pandemic, the number of contracts awarded after just one bid has been...
More Than Half Of Australia’s Procurement Is Uncompetitive
This week, the Australian Government House of Representative standing committee has been presiding over a an inquiry into government procurement practices. It comes after Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for...
Our story. Reinventing a business.
Spend Network exists because I almost lost everything. Where we came from: I'd built a consultancy with twenty staff and clients across the financial and government sectors. It was a...
UK and Central America Increase Trade Ties
The UK’s export credit agency UK Export Finance (UKEF), has signed a partnership with Banco Centroamericano de Integración Económica (BCIE), Central America’s leading development bank, to encourage the joint financing...
New Canadian Government Opportunities For Indigenous Businesses
We recently discussed new procurement changes in Australia with the Western Australian government procurement process, which includes specific policies to increase opportunities for Aboriginal businesses. The Government of Canada has...
Will Europe Get Stricter On Procurement?
The EU countries have agreed to pass the International Procurement Instrument (IPI), one that was initially proposed by the European Commission back in 2012. The purpose of the instrument is...
Has Protectionism Found A New Home?
One of the first acts of the Biden administration was to direct public buyers to buy from American firms. China is apparently doing the same and the EU is seeking...
Slovenia Strides Forward With Procurement Improvements
Slovenia is slated to join Ukraine as the only public administrations that will routinely monitor contract overspend on all public contracts. What's more, they're doing it in the open. Legislation...
South Korea Targets SME Growth Through Health Procurement
When selling to governments, SMEs often have challenges with matching the buying power and supply chain strength of larger organisations. For the South Korean Central Government, the pandemic has proved...
New Carbon Reporting To Impact 1,000 Suppliers
New rules to help reduce CO2 in public contracting show that at least 720 suppliers will be required to provide a detailed carbon reduction plan if they are to continue...
Trade, Policy And Procurement Meet Again.
The UK's Trade and Agriculture Commission has published its final report, along with twenty-two recommendations, one of which is to direct the UK Government to buy food sourced in the...
McGowan Government Enhances Aboriginal Procurement Policy
In 2018, Western Australian Labour Premier Mark McGowan introduced a landmark Aboriginal Procurement policy. The objective of the policy was to improve outcomes for Aboriginal businesses in the state with...
Are Trade Agencies Becoming More Like Hedge Funds?
Trade promotion, where a country promotes its companies and products to be bought by another, has a certain image. One imagines suave Alan Whicker clones sipping wine and doing deals...
Meeting The Research Challenge
Our clients expect us to answer tough questions. Questions like, "what's the total value of public contracting worldwide?" or, "who's the leading buyer of consulting services in Europe?" Being able...
US Consults On Social Procurement
The US Government's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has requested submissions on the "methods and leading practices" to assess whether agencies' policies and actions are meeting the needs of...
Harnessing Procurement To Tackle Climate Change
As experts in procurement and open data, we are pleased to see the recent announcement that global confectionery giant Mars is harnessing its procurement power to tackle climate change. Joining...
Western Australian Govt Rolls Out New Procurement Process.
We're always pleased to see governments reviewing their procurement processes with a view to greater transparency. The Western Australian Government has recently released a new framework, supporting their Procurement Act...
Commit To Net Zero To Win Government Contracts.
....So says the Cabinet Office, with new measures released on World Environment Day that will require businesses to publish clear and credible carbon reduction plans before they can bid for...
NZ Government Pharmaceutical Procurement Review
The New Zealand Government is taking steps to improve its procurement of national medicine supply through a review process. The Pharmaceutical Management Agency, better known as Pharmac, is a New...
Major Procurement Project For Inverness Castle
This week sees Highland Council publish the main construction and refurbishment tenders for the Inverness Castle Transformation project, through Public Contracts Scotland (PCS). The tenders are part of the master...
Six Considerations When Marketing To Governments.
We might say marketing to the government is similar to marketing to any other target market, particularly another B2B target market. And broadly, the principles remain the same, but there...
Data Mastery.
It's easy to say that you're a 'world leading' enterprise. It's much harder to back it up. But we genuinely believe that we're a world-leading enterprise when it comes to...
Recommendations For Tackling Gender Disparity For Governments
Clearly, the UK Government is a leader in the field of open data and transparency: it is this commitment to transparency as well as a commitment to addressing the issue...
Does Government Business Correlate To Gender Disparity?
As part of our Procuring Inequality report, we've analysed whether winning government business equates to a gender pay disparity. By linking gender disparity data on who won contracts with the...
The Worst Performing Suppliers To Government In The Gender Pay Divide.
As our analysis of the gender pay gap within strategic suppliers to government from our Procuring Inequality report, showed a broad overlap between the largest categories by contract value and...
Does The Number Of Women In Top Jobs Affect The Gender Pay Divide?
Through the creation of our report Procuring Inequality, we have analysed the proportion of women in the top jobs among the highest value procurement categories. We did this by looking...
How The Gender Pay Gap Differs By Procurement Category.
As part of our exploration into the gender pay gap through our report, Procuring Inequality, we analysed the industry sectors and how their pay divide compared. Concerningly, £133bn in contracts...
Exploring The Gender Pay Gap in Strategic Suppliers To Government
From our report, Procuring Inequality, the disparity in the gender pay gap is stark when looking at the strategic suppliers to the Government. Strategic suppliers are those organisations that the...
Do Government Buyers Perform Better In Gender Parity?
Part of our report Procuring Inequality, includes a gender pay gap comparison between Government departments and significant suppliers to government. Our analysis of ministerial departments shows a significant bias in...
Procuring Inequality: Our Report.
Spend Network is pleased to release our survey on the gender pay gap data in public procurement. We linked gender pay gap reports from over 2,600 organisations across nearly 31,000...
Our New Global Classification Tool
We recently launched our new global classification tool. Just three months later and we've been able to launch an upgraded version, which now achieves an accuracy rate of 92%, an...
UK Government Procurement Under Pressure
Yesterday the FT published an article, £19bn of UK Covid-related contracts awarded without seeking rival bids. The report reviewed the value of direct award government contracts over the pandemic, and...
Selling to procurement: Why No One Cares About Your Product
Selling to procurement professionals is something that most people find frustrating, mainly because they are highly resistant to direct sales. Why? Well, no one in procurement cares about your product,...
Our API: Data As A Service
The right data. When you want it. How you want it. Every day. Our API is built to meet your needs. That means the right data, every single day in...
Procurement Transparency Suffers Under Covid-19
Government publishing of procurement notices has fallen significantly following the global spread of Covid-19. The total number of tender notices published globally has fallen by nearly 40%, with the numbers...
South Africa, Kenya lead the way on African transparency.
Both South Africa and Kenya lead the way in procurement transparency according to our data, South Africa and Kenya publish more tender notices than the rest of the continent combined...
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;...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
Where Next For Data Led Procurement in Europe? A Discussion.
The They Buy For You Project (TBFY) concluded on 31 December 2020. To mark the occasion, we look back at three years of hard work, take stock and discuss the...
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...
Social Procurement Demands Data
-Ian Makgill Social value is going to be a critical feature of public procurement in the coming years. The urge to 'build back better' will quickly alight on the $13tn...
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...
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...
How Long Does It Take A Department To Publish A Contract Notice?
Public sector organisations have, according to guidance, thirty days to publish details of their contracts online. So, thirty days after a contract there should be a public notice with some...
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...
£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'...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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:...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
High priorities in PPE lead to missed opportunities
The NAO has just published a report criticising the government for using a 'high priority lane' where suppliers that were known to MPs were prioritised for public contracts for protective...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
UK Soon To Join WTO’s Government Procurement Agreement
On the 7th October 2020, the WTO's Government Procurement Act (GPA) members granted the UK the right to submit its GPA instrument of accession to the Committee in 2021. This...
Finding Beneficiaries of Public Money
By Alex Yeung. Part 1: The Matching Process Linking entities is a common theme in procurement data, but it is a significant problem in the UK. The concern with entity...
Can Anyone Do Business With Government?
By Fiona Hunt It’s understandable that for many SME’s, doing business with government is not high on their prospecting list. In the media, most of the coverage around government suppliers...
New Government Measures Include Social Value in Procurement
By Fiona Hunt In late September 2020, the UK Government released a new plan for delivering greater social value through its procurement processes. The new measures come into place in...
Consultancy contracts published
Today we're publishing all of the recent consultancy contracts for the UK. This data is free to download and reuse. There has been high levels of interest in the roles...
Opening Covid Contracts
Today we're openly publishing all of the contracts let by UK public sector for medical equipment and protective workwear. This data is free for anyone to download and reuse in...
How Does Procurement Compare By Country?
-Fiona Hunt. This simple graph gives us a fascinating insight into the respective size of government spending globally. From the recent report by Open Contracting Partnership and Spend Network, on...
Why Good Data Matters More Than Ever
Governments spend a lot. How we spend this money is important for a whole slew of reasons. We often overlook how well procurement functions on a day to day basis....
The little codes that hold our world together
Have you noticed that your email address is completely unique? Its obvious that this would be true, but it bears thinking about. In all the millions and millions of email...
Giving Away Data Makes Business Better
-Ian Makgill Giving away all your data for free sounds like a bad idea, especially when you're a business whose aim is to sell data. It sounds counter-intuitive, as if...
UK Leading Procurement Transparency Alongside Columbia and Ukraine.
By Fiona Hunt. The recent report on global government spending by Open Contracting Partnership and Spend Network, brought to light for the first time, the extraordinary size of the global...
What Needs To Happen to Open Public Procurement- Skills
-Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network. Our last post on what needs to happen to open procurement covers the skills you need to maintain a procurement publication service. Governments often focus...
What Needs To Happen To Open Public Procurement – Technology
-Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network Another key element to open public procurement is technology. Getting data into the public sphere can often be over complicated, but it needn't be. If...
What Needs To Happen to Open Public Procurement- Policy
-Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network There are three basic requirements for implementing a contracting transparency initiative, the first is policy. Creating new policies is easy, as long as you never...
Quantifying Global Public Procurement: Our Methodology
The Open Contracting Report 'Global Procurement Spend', is to our knowledge, the most comprehensive study of global public procurement yet. We are proud to be the data partner for the...
How Transparency Benefits Suppliers
Why suppliers gain from better data on their markets. -Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network. Better information creates better outcomes for those bidding into a market. Which is why incumbents have...
Understanding Global Procurement
Why are we looking at procurement globally, when collaboration between countries is so difficult? Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network Analysing public procurement on a global scale is, in one sense,...
$13 Trillion – The Global Value Of Public Procurement
Ian Makgill, Alex Yeung, Lindsey Marchessault We often hear about the scale of public procurement. With vast sums of money at stake, it is important that the public procurement market...
Our Partnership With Open Contracting
-Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network We're passionate advocates for contracting transparency. Not just because it makes it harder for corrupt officials and their partners, but also because there's good evidence...
Which Country’s Purchasing Changed During The Covid-19 Crisis?
Looking at the data on tenders over the past twelve months gives some insight into the ways that different governments are operating during the crisis. Looking at the twelve...
What Is The Right Price For PPE?
-Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network What's the right price for PPE gowns and masks? With every Government in the world yanking hard on the same supply chains, prices have increased...
One Among Thousands – Creating a Dictionary of Public Sector Buyers.
Here are just three among thousands of public sector buyers: YPO, JISC, NOE CPC. Who are they? What do they do? Are they a private organisation or a public organisation?...
Data Works: Ensuring Quality Through Validation
-Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network When is something right? We process over 150,000 records a month. Our database now has more than 150m rows in it. We can't view every...
Data Quantity on Contracts Finder: The Long View.
Covid-19 has shown us the importance of transparency in procurement. A transparent process allows suppliers and buyers to clearly identify each other, and set benchmarks on how others are buying...
Data Works: Creating Machine Learning Models For Categorisation
-Ian Makgill, Founder Spend Network We're working hard on a new set of machine learning models for categorisation. It has proven to be really challenging. Developing an accurate categorisation for...
Details Matter FT.com
Last week, we had an article featured in the Financial Times. Working with their team is always fantastic. They cut through to the issues and need to know that everything...
Why Beneficial Ownership Data Should Interest You.
The Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS) is an open data standard for publishing data on company ownership and control. You can find out more about the standard and the initiative...
Which Country’s Purchasing Changed the Most During the Covid-19 Crisis?
Looking at the data on tenders over the past twelve months gives some insight into the ways that different governments are operating during the crisis. Looking at the twelve...
Implementing procurement analytics? Start with service design.
-Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network If you're unsure what service design is, a good place to start is here . It's a fascinating area of business that is concerned with...
5 Steps To Tackle Public Procurement Corruption.
Governments have rightly relaxed procurement rules in order to act quickly on Covid-19, but stories already abound on alleged corruption and financial mismanagement. For instance, there are the tests that...
Your supplier is on mute.
Does video conferencing make it easier to evaluate suppliers? We're just finishing up a bid. Our heads are full of equality policies, pricing and schedules. It's a strong bid, a...
Do Governments Want to Trade with Small Business?
Why Covid-19 should change Government's view of contracting with SMEs. -By Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network. In April the Government awarded a £108m contract to Crisp Websites Limited, trading as...
The Case For Using Data In Public Procurement
Our current model of procurement uses data for limited purposes. The primary analysis conducted by procurement teams is spend analysis, where buyers seek to identify opportunities for aggregating demand. Aggregation...
Tackling Covid-19 with open procurement data
To help public sector buyers around the world combat the Covid-19 emergency, we have built our supplier search tool (http://openopps.com/covid-19). Our free service allows buyers to search for suppliers around...
Public procurement data needs work.
Government data is much like infrastructure, valuable when it is cared for, troublesome when it is left unloved. Government spends nearly £400bn a year with suppliers, but most of this...
New OJEU Procurement Thresholds for 2020
The Government has recently updated the procurement thresholds for public sector procurement processes for 2020. We outline what this means for you and your business. When does this take...
A free hand or a free market? How competitive is public procurement in Europe? Part three of a three part series
This article is the last of a three part series on competitive tendering in public procurement in Europe. We have already learned that European tendering is positive in some aspects...
A free hand or a free market? How competitive is public procurement in Europe? Part two of a three part series
This article is the second part of a three part series on competitive tendering in public procurement in Europe. There is a correlation between competitive tendering in public procurement and...
A free hand or a free market? How competitive is public procurement in Europe? Part one of a three part series
In this series of articles, we will explore how competitive the overall public procurement tendering process is for European countries. The most value for money in public procurement is linked...
Counting the human cost of supported accommodation
BBC Newsnight worked with Spend Network to report on supported accommodation for looked after children. This forms part of their series Britain's Hidden Children's Homes. At present, over 5,000 looked-after-children...
‘Data that Cares’, a report into the Adult Health and Social Care market using our data
We are pleased to announce the release of the FCC/IPPR report ‘Data that Cares’! This is a report into the Adult Health and Social Care Market that breaks new...
Region profile: Insurance in Europe
In this article, we explore public sector insurance tenders in Europe. First, we look at how many tenders are being issued year by year by public sector bodies in Europe...
Country Profile: South Africa
South Africa is seeing an increased interest in public procurement owing to corruption and the role it plays in economic development. The question is: where can the most impact be...
How closed is Malaysia? Country Profile: Malaysia
In the wake of the 1MBD scandal and the arrival of a new government, has any meaningful change occurred in Malaysia procurement? The answer is complicated. Tenders have opened up...
The French Connection: public sector demand in France
In this article we’ll be looking at France’s public sector demand over the past 5 years to see what the largest categories are. From our data, the top 21 types...
Building Europe, a Region Profile: Construction in Europe 2016 to mid 2019
For all its recent troubles, Europe is seeing growth in one sector: construction in the public sector. In this article, we explore the trends in the European public works sector....
Procurement jargon explained
Do you need a quick way to explain procurement terms? Here’s a run down of some common terms used in procurement, including acronyms to watch out for: Alcatel ('standstill') period...
6 golden rules for selling to Government
Globally, public sector contract spending is $13 trillion a year. This is a great opportunity for all kinds of businesses from consultancies to caterers. There is no shortage of advice...
Why do Government IT projects fail?
Why do Government IT projects consistently fail? Below are eight reasons why we keep getting this wrong. 1. We've bought into a tech utopia Believe that technology is a solution...