Procurement has always been an important aspect of ICT, particularly in the public sector. When spending taxpayers’ money there is a need to ensure that best value is achieved in every purchase.
However, best value isn’t always the same as the lowest price and having a process that balances the price with the overall quality of the goods or services is essential.
As budgets have become ever tighter, the need to extract the best value has increased the need for robust procurement exercises. At the same time, the weight of procurement legislation and rules relating to the advertisement of procurements above a certain value to the official journal of the EU and the proliferation of framework agreements to act as a balance has meant that running a procurement exercise has become a time-consuming exercise.
Whether they realise it or not, all bodies considered to be public sector, including schools and colleges, are bound by a legal framework; The Public Contract Regulations 2015 (PCR2015) enshrined into UK law the EU procurement directives, which among other things, mean that any procurement that exceeds the threshold (which is updated every couple of years) must be undertaken via a regulated route – that is it must meet a set of criteria enshrined in PCR2015.
ITspire can help. We have been responsible for procurement processes ranging from simple tenders for goods such as PC and laptops through to those that fall under the PCR2015 and require a regulated process.
We have undertaken many processes that use the request for further competition approach using the excellent frameworks available, and these have been for everything from mobile phones to telephony infrastructure through to fully managed IT services.
We can even simply review your budgets and provide you with reassurance that you are procuring through the correct route for the value of the contract and develop a forward plan so you can know in advance when you will need to undertake procurement processes to ensure that you stay within the rules and keep costs in check.
Each procurement is unique but having the experience of so many successful projects helps to ensure that an appropriate level of process is used and that this process is robust and delivers a cost-effective yet exemplary solution.
Of course, sometimes it may just be that you have been with the same supplier delivering a relatively low-value item or service for a long time and simply want to know if there are alternatives and what would be involved in testing the market. To see if the time and effort of the procurement is likely to deliver overall savings or if there is something better out there. ITspire can also offer to review your overall spending profile and advise where a market test would be helpful.
As with all of our services, we can do everything from a simple one-day exercise to advise on the appropriate method of procurement for a given project or a quick check to ensure that the documentation produced in-house fits with the procurement type through to a fully managed procurement via a framework where we write the specification and other documentation, manage the suppliers, undertake the scoring and handle the feedback once a successful bid has been selected.
For procurements of service contracts, we can also handle the onboarding process to ensure that the selected partner lives up to the commitments made during the procurement process and get the account review processes up and running to make sure the supplier continues to honour their commitments.
If any of that would be helpful to you, please drop us a line.