Tag Archives: L1
Francis Maude at PASC – select committee digs into UK government procurement
The UK parliament’s Public Administration Select Committee held the final hearing of their investigation into public sector procurement this week, and appropriately their witness was Francis Maude, the Minister with responsibility for the subject. As we’ve said many times, he is more interested in and knowledgeable about procurement than any other Minister we’ve had, and his hour or so on the topic was low key in style but quite illuminating. He got some good questioning from Bernard Jenkin, the Chair, but some of the other Committee members were poor in terms of their lack of any real insight or challenge. [...]
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Second-wave outsourcing – the BBC learns from past experience
At the recent ProcureCon Indirect conference, Jim Hemmington, Procurement Director at the BBC, spoke about the organisation’s experience through what is now a considerable history of outsourcing. Hemmington personally and the BBC corporately now go back 10 years or more in terms of outsourcing some pretty strategic and important activities, ranging from much of the transactional finance and HR, to specialist area such as licence fee collection and transmission services. So what’s interesting is how that considerable experience is now informing their latest strategies for what are second or even third time round outsourcing contracts and competitions. Hemmington passed on [...]
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Crown Commercial Representatives – male, pale and … very successful businessmen
If you’re thinking that we haven’t exactly been hot off the press with reporting on the appointment of six more UK government “Crown Commercial Representatives”, you’d be right. that’s because I’ve been working out just what exactly I think about it… They’re joining Cabinet Office to help central government manage their largest suppliers, and negotiate further savings, particularly in IT related areas. We understand they are in the main taking over work from current government CPOs, who have been doing this CCR role in addition to their departmental day jobs for the last couple of years. The roles were widely [...]
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ConsultancyONE finally complete – list of successful suppliers on framework published
Hooray! As thousands of management consultants dance in the streets (see picture), the full list of successful suppliers who have gained places on the UK government’s ConsultancyONE framework has now been released. I was expecting some sort of formal announcement, but it just seems to have been slipped out quietly to the providers and with this list on the Gov.uk website. Perhaps the government doesn’t want to draw attention to what has been a somewhat troubled procurement, ultimately requiring 18 months from start to finish. There are 15 separate Lots, ranging through functional consulting, audit, finance and multi-disciplinary work, and [...]
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Down the procurement pub – CIPS, the cost of risk management and the big UK / EU debate
So got my latest copy of Supply Management yesterday. I haven’t read all the articles yet, but there is content in this edition that all CIPS members should read. (Some of it is on-line as well of course. ) That includes a description of the new Congress, the body chaired by Melinda Johnson that represents members’ interests to the Institute. I was pleased to see that all the elected Congress delegates have got their email addresses on the CIPS website so members can contact them, although it has been left fairly loose in terms of how exactly that contact might [...]
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QinetiQ Commerce Decisions – CloudStore brings MOD sunshine!
The UK Government’s G-Cloud CloudStore seems to be reaching a critical mass and proving itself to be a success after a probably inevitably slow start. The new “G-Cloud III” list of suppliers goes live this week, but what is more impressive is that sales in March were £7M, compared to around £10M over the previous year or so since the initiative was first launched. And now with Francis Maude announcing a “cloud first” policy last week, that growth is likely to accelerate. All central government departments in the UK will now have to prioritise cloud services when buying IT. It’s [...]
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Supplier Management – David Atkinson asks what you might be giving away to suppliers
We looked last week at the general thrust of the excellent article from David Atkinson’s Four Pillars website . Today, let’s look in more detail at his core argument. As we said last time, he started with the example of staff from the large accounting firms working for Government on tax issues. Does this give them an advantage when they return to their firms – and do they have in effect a conflict of interest when they are working for the Government? But he then extends the argument into the private sector environment. If we’re engaged in a suppler relationship [...]
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A Spend Matters Book Club?
Should we start a Spend Matters Book Club? What do you think – is there an appetite for that? I’m not suggesting we go off and read Hilary Mantel or the latest hilarious exploits of a single mum trying to cope with… you know the sort of thing. We’d stick to procurement related books, maybe extending it to business or other factual books that have some relevance to our area. We could choose a book, maybe every couple of months, and then we could review it here (with the ability for anyone to contribute to the review). Perhaps we arrange [...]
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Yes Minister – Sir Humphrey raises his glass to centralised government Procurement
(Especially for the UK Bank Holiday – our latest homage to the brilliant Yes Minster and Yes Prime Minister series, written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn). - Humphrey, do come in. Thank you Minister. I’ve brought Colin with me. Colin is our Commercial Director. - Really? I have a Commercial Director? Yes, we used to call him Head of Purchasing but we thought Commercial sounded more… dynamic and twenty-first century somehow. - Well it’s nice to meet you Colin. Now, this is all about the new Cabinet Office plans for greater centralisation of procurement isn’t it? Francis Maude, master [...]
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Down the Procurement Pub – ISM, German PMIs, Balfour Beatty and Happy Vappu!
My US colleagues, Jason Busch and Pierre Mitchell, have been at the Institute of Supply Management’s 98th annual conference in Dallas this week. You can read a good overview here. What’s obvious is just how much more of a big thing the event is compared to the CIPS conference in the UK. OK, the US is a bigger country, but CIPS has in some ways been the more successful Institute over the last ten years. So why has CIPS never got to the position where someone like Condoleezza Rice – the keynote speaker this week at ISM – could be engaged? [...]
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David Atkinson on supplier management and tax avoidance
We’ve featured David Atkinson here before, our friend and ex Rolls-Royce procurement executive and now procurement adviser, thinker, and educator. He has that unusual combination of real CPO type experience along with a very enquiring mind and the desire to really think about procurement, and that blend informs his writing very successfully. * He’s just published a really excellent new article on his Four Pillars website – you can read it here. In it, he manages to go from the current debate in the UK around large firms using tax avoidance / evasion methods, to asymmetry in buyer / supplier [...]
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Value Procurement – is this the next big thing? Bill Young and the issues with Category Management
In our coverage of the recent ProcureCon Indirect event, we commented on the “confusion”, or at very least lack of consistency of approach, shown by different presentations given at the conference. Some fundamental questions suggested themselves. Is category management being superseded by more business-focused procurement strategies? Is the role of procurement purely to support the business or is there more to it that that? Coincidentally, just as these debates were going on, Bill Young wrote an excellent piece for the Procurement Leaders website. It’s very thought provoking and picks up on some of those points exactly. (Young was a senior [...]
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NHS Supply Chain – saving money for the health service with really, really big warehouses
I recently paid a visit to a really, really huge warehouse. Now let’s be honest, there are only so many things you can say when faced with this situation. “Wow, that’s a really huge warehouse” is probably the most obvious. “Isn’t it tidy and well organised”? That doesn’t apply in all cases, but certainly did in this case. “What a lot of tea-bags and washing up liquid” – now, that was one I didn’t quite expect. Because the NHS Supply Chain warehouse at Rugby operated by global logistics firm DHL is huge, certainly appears to be efficiently run, and does [...]
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A decision to delay the decision about MOD procurement as DE&S uncertainty continues
Last week, Philip Hammond, the UK’s Defence Minister, announced the next stage in the move towards turning the MOD’s Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) organisation into a “GoCo” – a government owned, contractor operated entity. This whole initiative has been dragging on now for years . Bernard Gray, the architect of the plan, joined MOD in January 2011 but wrote his report (the beginning of this whole debate) in 2009, so it has taken some time just to get to this point of announcing – well, announcing that no real decision will be made for another year (at least)! Whilst [...]
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April Music Review – James Blake, Caitlin Rose, Kacey Musgraves, and Uncle Acid!
I loved James Blake’s first album, which was in my top 10 of 2011. He was positioned as a mainstream singer songwriter type, but like the eponymous first album, Overgrown is a complex and original work. It isn’t “difficult”, in the sense that there are tunes, and the overall vibe is pretty laid back – you can let it drift over you quite easily, so it’s not exactly Metal Machine Music. But it doesn’t fit neat pigeonholes, as we get influences including dubstep, folk, modern classical and electronica, blended by Blake. And there is some weirdness in there – as [...]
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Down the Procurement Pub – CIPS Surrey, a Times hagiography , and better UK GDP numbers
Thanks to everyone who came to the YMCA Guildford (all together now, “Y M C A – ay”) last night for my presentation to the CIPS Surrey Branch It was a beautiful evening, so I fully expected a dropout rate of around 90% but actually it wasn’t a bad turnout, with around 30 people turning up – thanks to all of them. We discussed deep issues around supplier management and supplier life cycle approaches to procurement, and less deep around horsemeat, green potatoes and dodgy management consultants! We’ll come back next week to some of the interesting discussion about the [...]
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- Dark Procurement – ethics and moral dilemmas : Gordon Murray said: Excuse the poor English in the previous reply, that should have been: Can you just confirm... more
- Dark Procurement – ethics and moral dilemmas : Gordon Murray said: Hi, B&T, can you just confirm that you would pay an additional £1m for something the ... more
- From Hubris to High Court (almost) – The Story of Southwest One (Part 1) : James Garrett said: That the wheels came off Southwest One was never a surprise to those who followed its shak... more
- From Hubris to High Court (almost) – The Story of Southwest One (Part 1) : Prof Dexter Whitfield said: I find the idea that the Conservatives 'sabotaged' the contract as fanciful and plainly in... more
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