Supporting the use of joint procurement

Development of tools and operations, resources and cooperation, and effectiveness – these are the words that sum up the achievements and, to some extent, the challenges in the support for joint procurement in 2023.

In terms of the development of tools, we took a big step forward early in the year by deciding to automate customer contacts in our minicompetitions. The project required both extensive surveying of the current operations and a detailed analysis of different situations. In addition to the survey of operations, the automation required a change of working methods.

With our partner Fellowmind, we got the tool up and running, and the deployment of the new customer service feature at the end of April went smoothly. The new tool was accepted enthusiastically, and it essentially improved our working methods and enabled the monitoring of joint procurement. Since the launch, we have gained extremely important insights into the issues and support needs of the different joint procurement procedures. Since the end of April, we have received more than 800 contacts from our customers, of which around 570 concerned advice in a specific joint procurement case. In a little over 200 cases, we commented on the procurement documents included in a customer’s internal tendering procedure. In addition to the above, we assisted our customers by phone and carried out 120 minicompetitions in cooperation with customers.

Many operational improvements achieved during the year and many resource challenges overcome were due to the power of collaboration. More comprehensive collaboration between units allowed us to create customer materials of a better quality and a smoother customer service chain. These efforts bore fruit, as we received praise from our customers both digitally and at wonderful live events at which we presented the support we offer in joint procurement.

Measurement of effectiveness started with minicompetitions

In addition to the development of our operations and deeper collaboration, we started new effectiveness work in our unit by starting to develop an impact analysis that is already in use in tendering services to make it suitable for minicompetitions in joint procurement. A dynamic procurement system for cleaning services and a related minicompetition were chosen as the basis for building the model and as the pilot project.

In the early stages of the project, it had already become clear that the impact assessment had to be split into two stages to measure the overall effectiveness of a joint procurement procedure including a minicompetition. The first step is to analyse the effectiveness of the joint procurement itself, followed by the impact of the minicompetition on a customer-by-customer basis. As a result of the development work, we created a pilot model to analyse an effectiveness index produced based on the utilisation of the joint procurement itself, which the customer can further improve through their own choices during the minicompetition. After the development of the model, we quickly found an actual pilot tendering procedure in which we could test the model in practice. The work to support joint procurement will continue with the aim of making procurement procedures even more effective in future.

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