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Understanding Global Procurement

Why are we looking at procurement globally, when collaboration between countries is so difficult? Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network Analysing public procurement on a global scale is, in one sense, hiding to nothing. After all, how useful is it to directly compare contracting in Bejing with contracts let in Bourdeaux? The nature of public administration in both ...

$13 Trillion – The Global Value Of Public Procurement

Ian Makgill, Alex Yeung, Lindsey Marchessault  We often hear about the scale of public procurement. With vast sums of money at stake, it is important that the public procurement market is fair, efficient, and effective. However, it has been many years since anyone has actually quantified its annual global value. Thus far, there has been no attempt to ...
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Our Partnership With Open Contracting

-Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network We're passionate advocates for contracting transparency. Not just because it makes it harder for corrupt officials and their partners, but also because there's good evidence that it makes public markets more competitive and more efficient. That's why we work so closely with the Open Contracting Partnership, they're the ones doing the heavy lifting ...
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What Is The Right Price For PPE?

-Ian Makgill, Founder, Spend Network What's the right price for PPE gowns and masks? With every Government in the world yanking hard on the same supply chains, prices have increased significantly. The UK Government has made it clear that they're willing to do what they can to get the equipment they need to protect NHS staff. We've written ...

One Among Thousands – Creating a Dictionary of Public Sector Buyers.

Here are just three among thousands of public sector buyers: YPO, JISC, NOE CPC. Who are they? What do they do? Are they a private organisation or a public organisation? Every month, we get data for tens of thousands of unique buyer names just like these, from around the world. We answer the questions of who they are and what ...

Data Works: Ensuring Quality Through Validation

When is something right? We process over 150,000 records a month. Our database now has more than 150m rows in it. We can't view every record when we enter it. Instead, we validate it. We check that each record has what our users need; a deadline date, a description and a buyer. We also check that our key sources ...
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Data Quantity on Contracts Finder: The Long View.

Covid-19 has shown us the importance of transparency in procurement. A transparent process allows suppliers and buyers to clearly identify each other, and set benchmarks on how others are buying and selling. Contracts Finder has made great strides in facilitating this transparency over recent years. The Public Contracts Regulations 2015, an Act of Parliament, established the existence ...
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Data Works: Creating Machine Learning Models For Categorisation

-Ian Makgill, Founder Spend Network We're working hard on a new set of machine learning models for categorisation. It has proven to be really challenging. Developing an accurate categorisation for all our data is our ultimate goal. At the moment, some records have classifications, some do not. Some of the records with classifications aren't correct. We want our users ...
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Details Matter FT.com

Last week, we had an article featured in the Financial Times. Working with their team is always fantastic. They cut through to the issues and need to know that everything is right. The night before publishing, we were discussing one of the figures "Was it safe to say that Hesse really spent €700m on masks?" Yes, and no. The original notice ...
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Why Beneficial Ownership Data Should Interest You.

The Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS) is an open data standard for publishing data on company ownership and control. You can find out more about the standard and the initiative to publish BODS data here. Over 80 countries are already committed to using the standard, so we can expect to see more of this data in the ...
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5 Steps To Tackle Public Procurement Corruption.

Governments have rightly relaxed procurement rules in order to act quickly on Covid-19, but stories already abound on alleged corruption and financial mismanagement. For instance, there are the tests that don't work , the ventilators that never materialised, the PPE that failed to arrive, and the Health Minister who was sacked.  What's telling, is that these were ...
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Your supplier is on mute.

Does video conferencing make it easier to evaluate suppliers? We're just finishing up a bid. Our heads are full of equality policies, pricing and schedules. It's a strong bid, a great team and we've got all the necessary experience. It feels good. We've written a lot, it has taken a long time, but could it be different? It used ...

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