NHS Wales to join the drive for adoption of GS1 standards
Jan 15, 2021
GS1 UK is a community of more than 42,000 members working in areas such as retail, foodservice and healthcare. It is one of 115 independent, not-for-profit GS1 organisations operating across 150 countries worldwide. It helps everyone involved in making, moving and trading goods to automate and...
Roadmap lays out public sector AI priorities
Jan 15, 2021
The AI Council, an independent expert committee set up by the UK Government, says the public sector should be a priority area for AI innovation, which could be harnessed to improve services and policy making. In its new AI Roadmap report, it urges the UK Government to give civil servants a central...
Speeding up the payment of public contracts
Jan 15, 2021
Erica Bosio, a researcher at the World Bank Group, Greta Polo, a private sector development analyst at the World Bank and Vinay Sharma, global director of solutions and innovations in procurement at the World Bank’s governance global practice give their take on how to speed up the payment of...
Global clinical staffing services market intelligence procurement report
Dec 11, 2020
The latest Clinical Staffing Services market research report from SpendEdge indicates an incremental growth during the forecast period as the business impact of COVID-19 spreads. The market, segmented by geographic landscape (North America, APAC, Europe, South America and MEA) is expected to...
Plans for robot soldiers on the battlefield
Dec 11, 2020
The head of the UK’s armed forces has suggested that as many as 30,000 “robot soldiers” could be fighting alongside humans in the near future as the British army is forced to modernise. General Sir Nick Carter is reported to have said that an armed forces that is “designed for the...
AI4Cities has launched Request for Tenders
Dec 11, 2020
Six European cities and regions — Amsterdam (Netherlands), Copenhagen (Denmark), Helsinki (Finland), Île-de-France, Paris Region (France), Stavanger (Norway) and Tallinn (Estonia) — have developed ambitious strategies and policy plans to become carbon neutral by at latest 2050. AI4Cities, an...
Public buyers urged to prepare for Find a Tender
Dec 3, 2020
UK public sector buyers will be required to publish notices for procurements to the new UK e-notification service Find a Tender (FTS) from 11pm on Dec. 31, 2020.
In a Procurement Policy Note (PPN), the Cabinet Office said public sector buyers must use FTS rather than European public procurement...
Why governments need an AI strategy: A conversation with the WEF’s head of AI
Dec 3, 2020
McKinsey’s David DeLallo and Kay Firth-Butterfield, the head of AI and machine learning at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, discuss how individual governments are strategizing on how best to use AI to benefit their citizens. With its widespread...
UK review urges mandatory transparency on use of algorithms in public sector
Dec 3, 2020
The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI), a panel that advises the UK government on artificial intelligence and data-driven technology, has said public bodies should be required to publish information on how the decision to use an algorithm was made, the type of algorithm used, how it was...
NAO report ‘will do little to quell concerns about cronyism in UK government procurement’
Nov 20, 2020
A Whitehall spending watchdog report ‘will do little to quell concerns about cronyism in UK government procurement’- says OpenDemocracy. It would appear that more than £10 billion of contracts were awarded by the UK government without competition during the sourcing of PPE. The spending...
UK Government creates £1bn deal to buy direct from major software vendors
Nov 20, 2020
The UK government is creating a £1bn-plus framework to allow organisations across the public sector to buy a comprehensive range of back-office software tools direct from major vendors. The framework, which will be worth an estimated £1.2bn, is due come into effect in April 2021 and will last for...
The Sustainable Procurement Pledge turns one
Nov 20, 2020
The Sustainable Procurement Pledge (SPP) is now a year old — it began as a community of like-minded procurement people from industry, academia and third sector who are committed to embedding sustainability into their procurement practices — and its ranks are growing. More than 2000 procurement...
Perspectives and Insights
We have some other written articles around the issues of lots and lotting (splitting up their contract requirements into smaller contracts), and …
One major trend over the past twenty years in public procurement has been the greater centralization of procurement activity. Conceptually and practically, collaborative procurement is …
Think you know all about public sector owned professional buying organisations (PBOs) and what they do? Here are ten interesting facts that might just surprise …
Policies and Regulations
A few months back, we published several articles about the very interesting – and somewhat shocking – court case around the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning …
The Procurement of Innovation Platform aims to make public procurement of innovation a widespread reality in Europe. The Platform has been developed to help public …
Why Evaluation in Public Procurement is Important If the phrase “bid evaluation” makes you cringe, don’t worry: you’re not alone. If …