PME4U Blog – Page 2

PME4U Blogs

Data Provider Built in Excel

I was presented with an excellent challenge by one of my clients a couple of weeks back. They had established a contractual arrangement with twenty providers that contained an effective suite of KPIs for measuring and managing performance, but sadly lacked the ability to capture and report on those KPIs. Next they developed a nifty Excel workbook for the vendors to complete and provide their data, but the workbook was made up of seventeen different worksheets and each was in a different layout designed to make data entry easy. It did not make reporting easy though and the is where I come in.

What can we learn from the Competitive Dialogue process model?

Competitive dialogue is an approach to market that is somewhat akin to parallel negotiation, but instead of hashing out the finer points of the final contract, the aim is to have the market refine the specification before it is published to invite final offers. It utilises the additional parameters of shared intellectual property and a collaborative process in a controlled environment that retains competitive tension through to the signing of the final contract. First written into European procurement regulations in 2006, the methodology has become a preferred method of market engagement for complex projects in the UK and it is now written into the procurement policies in New Zealand, but it is largely unheard of in Australia. The process is designed for the strictly regulated public sector procurement environment of Europe, but is there something to be learned for other environments?

Contracting services with certainty when requirements are uncertain

The whole concept of a contract is to provide certainty of the agreement between two or more parties, but what do you do if that certainty does not exist and you need to provide a level of certainty in the relationship?

The importance of compliance with policy

A few years ago I was told by a middle manager to stop referring to the policy “…as the policy is not always right”. More recently I was in a procurement reform workshop and the statement was made that we should “…stop focusing on compliance and instead focus on outcome”. Back a few years I was chatting to a bio chemist who was traveling the world reviewing quality systems, he said “Australia has some of the best quality systems I’ve seen anywhere in the world…none of them work, but on paper they look great”. These are all symptoms of the same issue and often “reducing compliance” is seen as the answer, but what is really going on?

Managing overload in procurement

I have found that generally ten concurrent procurement projects of varying complexity per practitioner is about the upper limit of being able to ensure enough focus is placed on each job. Right now though, with the combination of team members being on leave and the new year projects kicking off, I find myself with closer to 30 concurrent jobs. As I was attempting to review a complex plan, I could see the Outlook popups fading in and out in an almost constant stream. I likened it to sitting in a boat under a waterfall trying to bail it out with a thimble. So what tactics can we use to manage these periods of intense overload?

What is so bad about single sourcing?

Proponents of single sourcing will identify value for money in the close working relationship, saved time through removal of ramp up requirements and extensive knowledge of the organisation. So why do procurement professionals frown upon single sourcing to the point of implementing policies and extended approvals in an attempt to deter it?

Advanced Excel Contracts Manager – Overview

Spreadsheets are a powerful and commonly used tool in procurement. Whether used to track what contracts we have, calculate cost, score evaluations or tracking projects. However, few Excel workbooks in procurement really leverage the full power and possibilities of Excel. With just a basic knowledge of the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) language, you can turn your Excel workbook, into an Excel Application with functionality you never considered possible in a spreadsheet. This is the first in a series of blogs covering the development and use of an Excel Application to build a Advanced Excel Contracts Manager for managing Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM).

Advanced Excel Contract Manager – Contract fields and validation

A critical component in building a powerful contract life cycle management application in Excel is to determine what data you want to capture and then taking steps to ensure data quality is maintained. It is always a balance between usability and the need to build meaningful reporting. While using a standard format spreadsheet quickly becomes arduous when there are more than 15 fields of data, the Advanced XL Contract Manager provides functionality that makes capturing a hundred fields efficient and easy. There are the obvious fields such as the contract number, title, description, start and expiry dates. But there are a few fields you may not have thought of. In this blog, we’ll start with defining the Contract fields and validation methods to make sure our data stays clean.

Weightings or no weightings, that is the question

Establishing a detailed and concise set of response criteria not only facilitates the extraction of key information in vendors responses, helping to align their solution with the actual requirements, it also allows easier evaluation and scoring of those responses, but not all criteria has equal importance. This is where applying a method of weighting the criteria provides the ability to define which criterion will have the greatest benefit to delivering the requirement and is therefore more important. But the question is, should the weighting be published as part of the invitation for offer, or should it be for internal information only?

Establish and Maintain Competitive Tension in Procurement Processes

Establishing and maintaining competitive tension in your procurement processes is the easiest and most effective method of driving value for money outcomes. So what is competitive tension? The most elegant description I have seen is that a proponent perceives a creditable threat to their ability to win the bid. The three key words are “perceives” and “credible threat”.