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 Pestfix (https://www.pestfix.co.uk) a small, family-owned firm in Littlehampton, West Sussex for the supply of PPE. At the time of the award, Pestfix had little or no trading history ...
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 is where a buyer purchases more goods or services from a single supplier in order to achieve price reductions. In the public sector, spend analysis typically ...
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 the world that provide critical goods and services. By searching for a particular term, such as ‘PPE’ or ‘protective equipment’, users can be instantly connected to a ...
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 data is only available to the buyers and their suppliers. This is fine for managing individual contracts, but it is no good if you want to manage ...
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 place?
The updated thresholds for public procurement will affect new procurement processes from 1st January 2020 to 31st December 2020
Does Brexit affect this?
Yes and no. From 31st January 2020, ...
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 (amount of time given to respond) and less positive in others (provision of information to bidders). In this article, we’ll be looking at the number of ...
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 value for money as well as broader, positive procurement outcomes (e.g. contract completion on time, in full). As before, data was extracted from Tenders Electronic Daily ...
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 to a competitive tendering process. This means encouraging multiple bidders to present offers. There are many ways to do this, all of which have a demonstrable ...
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.
An overview of Europe's public sector construction market
As we can see from the chart for the period from the beginning of 2016 to present the amount of ...
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
A ten calendar day standstill period between the announcement of a contract award on OJEU and the signing of a contract, designed so unsuccessful bidders have time ...
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 available so we reviewed dozens of these advice articles and stripped them down to these golden rules:
1. Know the rules
Before getting started, you must understand the ...
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 to difficult problems, and we start to think about the edge case of possibilities and how it can be used to deliver a utopian future - blockchain anyone? ...