Celebrating our Awesome Procurement Graduates 2021 – 2022!
We’re thrilled to announce the following graduates who have achieved their public sector Procurement Qualification through working through the Clever Buying Procurement training and assessment programme in 2021 – 2022. Every one of these people has demonstrated they have excellent practical skills in procurement planning, developing RFx documents, and managing tender processes and evaluation. These […]
Your Four Best Tools for World-Class Procurement
Procurement is tough, right? It’s hard to reach the peak of procurement excellence with huge pressure on public organisations to get value for money, short timeframes, complex and risky projects, and pressure to find sustainable solutions – finding the right supplier can be difficult. We have good news! Here are four simple ways you can make […]
How to spot a flawed Procurement Process – fast
A ten-point checklist for busy Procurement Managers You’re emailed a Procurement Plan or RFx for approval, and you’ve got very limited time to check it. Sadly, many RFTs that are prepared by so-called seasoned procurement professionals are not well put together – and as a result, they attract poor quality (or no!) responses. Here’s a […]
Five top tips for setting weights with SQP25
It’s been a couple of years since we introduced SQP25 – a powerful adaptation of the NZTA’s Attribute Weight Setting Tool. In that period, it’s been used by scores of tender evaluation teams to take the guesswork (and hopefully, the nasty surprises) out of setting attribute weights. Through that experience, we’ve refined our thinking and […]
How to become a ‘client of choice’
Making best use of an increasingly limited supplier market to deliver ambitious infrastructure programmes is a challenge for all government agencies today. When work is scarce, the choice between large and small contractors; and between local, regional and offshore suppliers is a luxury that plays into the hands of our buyers. But what happens when […]
Should our big spenders be qualified?
Isn’t it time that those who spend tens of billions of dollars of public money every year should be obliged to be trained and qualified to spend it wisely? We think a generic NZQA-accredited procurement qualification should be required for procurement practitioners of significant projects. The savings – both in procurement process efficiency and in […]
SQP25 – a new tool to select the right Attribute Weightings
It’s a breakthrough! A new tool that helps you pay the right premium for quality – every time. Setting weights in tenders has always been tricky. Even with the benefits of transparency provided by the Price Quality Method, tender evaluations vary considerably and sometimes produce recommendations that don’t appear to support Value for Money. Our […]
A Landmark Legal Decision exposes unfair Tendering Practices
A victory was scored by a supplier in late July 2015, with a High Court decision against a Ministry that breached Government’s Procurement Rules. The tendering decision was overturned, and all legal costs of the plaintiff were borne by the defendant. The Problem Gambling Foundation has successfully challenged a tendering decision by the Ministry of […]
New Tools That Cut Tender Evaluation Costs
The NZTA’s Procurement manual, together with various guides available from MBIE, is now firmly established as the benchmark for local government procurement. Many councils have opted to use the NZTA’s procedures for procurement in areas that have no relation to the NZTA-funded transport projects (where the procedures are mandatory). A series of workshops for qualified […]
