Supplies, Goods and Services are generally procured by competition.. Requirements that exceed the EU Procurement Directive thresholds are advertised in the supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU).
There is a typical procurement process, which we follow and adhere to once it has been identified which goods/services are required. Whenever we invite a company to tender we:
We will evaluate all tenders fairly.
Each tender will be assessed against the same criteria.
The successful tender will be the one which best meets our needs in accordance with the pre-determined evaluation criteria, which in turn will offer us best value for money in terms of whole life costs.
Tenderers may be asked to present their proposals to the tender evaluation team. There may be a period of clarifying the tender before it is officially accepted.
The contract is awarded as soon as possible after the evaluation process has been completed. A formal letter of acceptance is sent to the successful supplier and letters of decline are sent to those that are unsuccessful.
We offer to debrief unsuccessful suppliers if required, within the constraints of confidentiality, giving constructive comments on the strengths and weaknesses of their bid, with the aim to enable suppliers to better compete in the future. Details of other tenders will not be discussed.
We also encourage constructive feedback by the suppliers on the tender process.
We work together to ensure that operationally we are ready for the forthcoming contract. This generally involves ensuring open lines of communication, both internally and externally, are in place early to give the best notice to all parties concerned.
Contracts are closely monitored by our contract managers on a day to day basis, either locally and/or regionally as appropriate. We have a responsibility to ensure propriety of public funds by monitoring the supplier's performance against the specification, customer needs and contracted costs. In order to do this we gather performance information from our end-users as well as using the management information provided by the contracted suppliers.