Procurement & Scandal. What next, for COVID-19 and public sector procurement?

A lot has been spoken about the ethics of procurement professionals following the PPE scandal. Blame has been laid at the door of procurement professionals. This is the moment for Chief Procurement Officers to realise that end users may often not consider the department of procurement as useful enough and hence they bypass them through protocol and delegation of authority. When scandal breaks, accused number one is procurement but how much control do they have and what is their influence in decision making?

Deviations from formal processes occur even in organisations that have clear governance guidelines, but the lack of digital adaptation within procurement has left a lot of room for deviations from stipulated processes, and worse off mistakes within procurement as a function. Manual processes can create an opportunity for emergency procurement to be taken into consideration when average turnaround time for a tender process is 8 months.

My argument is digitalising procurement can trim timelines and increase efficiency and in turn improve end user experience making procurement people “go to people” in cases of emergency (urgent need) and in this particular case a pandemic.

Digitisation of procurement enhances the organisation’s ability to audit completed and active processes and this can serve as a deterrent to unethical activities. Chief Procurement Officers now need to be aggressive in the digitization of procurement otherwise they remain scapegoats for opportunists and just bad actors within the system. #PPE #Procurement #SaaS #ePactProcurement&ContractManagement

Written by Kennedy Marondedze