Cooperation EU Countries on Public Procurement

Conference on procurement: making procurement better

Together with the Open State Foundation and the Open Contracting Partnership the Ministry of Internal Affairs organized an international conference in Amsterdam. This conference offered the biggest platform for discussion in 2022 in the areas of transparency, technology and innovation in public procurement. It explored how we can make procurement better using open data, technology, and stakeholder engagement. The given presentations and profiles of the speakers, the recordings of the sessions and the background documents are accessible on open-procurement.nl.

Award winning tender 2022: category ICT Workplace Environment 

Sharing best practices is one way of helping each other to get the best tenders and resulting contracts. The objective of the procurement category ‘ICT Workplace Environment of the National Government’ (In Dutch: ICT Werkomgeving Rijk, IWR) is to be among the sustainability forerunners within Europe. In the words of category manager Lucien Claassen: “Challenge the market and let the market players brainstorm together on how they’re going to solve your sustainable procurement problem.” And with success: this category was announced as winner of the 'Innovation Procurement of the Year' Award during the Procura+ Awards 2022 on October 12th with its project IWR2021 Workplace Hardware.

Jury comment: very innovative character

Recognizing the outstanding innovation of the procurement and the public authority as a launch customer, the jury comment was that “the tender had a very innovative character, as it’s very large and has challenged the market to supply ambitious products with the application of many elements for the first time in ICT”. See the profile of Lucien Claassen, his presentation on the conference on open-procurement.nl. Or read an interview with Lucien Claassen on Denkdoeduurzaam.nl. 

Procura+ Awards

The Procura+ Awards are organized annually by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), an international non-governmental organization (NGO) that promotes sustainable development. The awards reward successful, already ongoing, sustainable, circular, and innovative public procurement. These tenders lead to significant improvements in public goods, services, processes, and infrastructure. Through these awards, the network wants to draw attention to sustainable, circular and innovative purchasing.

Documents on procurement

The Platform Open Procurement (zakendoenmethetrijk.nl) was created with a grant of EU/HADEA. Each step on the way is carefully documented. The main documents are:

• The report of the Open State Foundation on the need of stakeholders of procurement information; 
• The policy response of the state secretary of the Ministry of Internal affairs on this report, including the expert advice on the juridical barriers by opening up procurement data;
• The report 'Open Public Procurement Data by Default (recommendations) by Professor Public Procurement of the University of Utrecht, Fredo Schotanus, for the Dutch central government for making different types of public procurement data publicly available; 
• The response of the Ministry of Internal affairs on the report 'Open Public Procurement Data by Default'.

Want to know more? In that case you can contact Peter Specker (Peter.Specker@minbzk.nl)