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Revolutionising Government Procurement with Predictive Analytics

The realm of government procurement is undergoing an evolution. Predictive analytics, an approach to harnessing data insights, is changing how governments approach procurement processes. This article explores the impact of analytics on government procurement, highlighting how it enhances efficiency, transparency, and strategic resource allocation. The Power of Predictive Analytics in Government Procurement Predictive analytics involves leveraging historical data, ...

Using Data Analytics To Enhance Transparency in Government Procurement

Transparency and accountability are the cornerstones of effective governance. In the realm of public procurement, these are critical to ensure fair competition, prevent corruption, and optimise resource allocation. In recent years, the integration of data analytics has emerged as a key way for governments to analyse their  procurement processes.  The Promise of Data Analytics Data analytics, the process ...

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 exactly the same, but this doesn’t work if the records are very slightly different. A missing comma is enough to render that algorithm useless. Doing deduplication properly ...

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 they are bidding on and winning government contracts. This includes an understanding of both the number and the value of the contracts, as well as their sector.  ...

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 in the consultation, but some of those promises, notably those around transparency remain undefined. That’s not to say that they won’t be there, rather that they’re not ...

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 next question is “how do we put that into context”? In other words, is 20% bad or good? That will mean conducting the same analysis at a different time. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. We’ve got a first draft analysis and projections for carbon emissions based on the UK’s contract data. We’re sharing an early dashboard to get feedback- you'll find it here www.spendnetwork.com/carbon Get ...

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 received is staying stubbornly high at 20%. This means that one in five bids doesn't accrue enough interest to create any competition. We call these zombie tenders and ...
A session of the 10th East Asia Summit (EAS)

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 in Asia falling by 68%. In many cases, the pandemic has forced buyers to focus on emergency procurements, particularly of personal protective equipment for medical staff. These ...

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 future of procurement analytics to unlock data value chains. Our conversation is with Till Christopher Lech (SINTEF Digital), Elena Simperl (King's College, London), Oscar Corcho (Universidad ...
Pedestrians crossing a snowy street

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 ...
Map of Europe from the time of Charlemagne

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 ...
Front cover of our EU Covid-19 procurement report

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 ...

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