Measuring the World: The World Bank’s Public Procurement Benchmarking
23 Aug 2016
Every year the World Bank benchmarks the regulatory environments in 77 economies the world over, assessing their impact on the public procurement process. The benchmarking essentially cuts across two lines: The procurement lifecycle (how well the contract lifecycle from bid preparation to contract...
Be Careful Using Procurement Thresholds that Lead to Disqualification of Bidders in Tenders
18 Aug 2016
A recent court case in the UK is likely to become a much-quoted example of case law for public procurement legal challenges by unsuccessful bidders. The NDA case (click link to get the full judgement) involves a challenge by Energy Solutions Ltd. who were the incumbent supplier for a huge contract...
Implementing E-Procurement – Kenya Runs Into Problems
25 Sep 2015
It is not long ago that the introduction of e-procurement in Kenya was being hailed as a big success. Like many other countries in Africa and indeed other parts of the world, corruption has been a major problem in public procurement, and the introduction of e-procurement was seen as one way of...
Milton Keynes Loses Challenge, Important Implications for Public Procurement Law in Europe
8 Aug 2015
This is a legacy piece form our archives A recent procurement challenge led to a subsequent fascinating legal case in the UK. The case looks set to go down as a landmark case in terms of public procurement regulations and case law. It is likely to be quoted many times in the future, we suspect,...
Australia Seeks to Use Procurement to Empower Aboriginal Australians
4 May 2015
As a son of an Australian immigrant, one of my father’s most prized possessions—and yet one which my mom kept hidden in a guest room until the past few years as we have dealt with his Alzheimer’s—is a set of two lithograph prints my grandmother brought with them when she and my father...
New EU Directives on Abnormally Low Tenders – Implications for Procurement
22 Sep 2014
EU Public Procurement Directives targeting low tenders are beginning to be implemented following their adoption in April of this year. Three directives which would change the way public procurers treat abnormally low tenders (ALTs) must be implemented by member states before April 2016. However,...
New E-procurement System for Kenya to Stop Corruption
15 Apr 2014
This is an article from our archives, originally published on August, 15, 2014. Last week, Kenya officially launched their new national E-procurement system, with the President formally launching the initiative, a sign of how important this is perceived to be in the country. Kenya has had a...
Public Spend Forum’s Public Procurement Weekly Roundup
DHS is seeking tech proposals from small businesses, industry leaders provide bold predictions for federal tech this year, and GSA plans to launch a pilot program to collect data and identify best practices from multiple e-commerce providers. All this and more in Public Spend Forum’s first weekly...
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 …