Public Procurement and Property

The Procurement Journey and Supplier Journey Podcast

May 11, 2023 by Melissa Reilly No Comments | Category Best practice, buyers, Procurement Journey, Supplier Journey, suppliers

“Procurement can no longer be a tick box exercise – it’s much more than that”

The Procurement Journey (PJ) and Supplier Journey (SJ) provide best practice procurement guidance for public sector buyers and suppliers. They cover all goods and services spend except construction and utilities.

The award-nominated websites are recognised as global leaders in terms of their content and usability. Our public sector buyers and suppliers in Scotland use the content on a day to day basis, with other government agencies in the UK and beyond using the systems and emulating the provision within their own areas.

In 2022, the Procurement Journey had over 104,000 users and the Supplier Journey had over 22,000 users. The website users come from all over the world and include countries across Europe, and as far away as the US, India, Kenya, China and Australia.

The websites not only provide our best practice guidance for buyers and suppliers but also have many free additional resources. From downloadable documents and tools available through our document library, to checklists, case studies, standard forms and more.

Lizanne Drummond and Paula Naughton from the Best Practice Team recently joined Melissa from the Communications Team on the Scottish Procurement and Property Podcast. To find out more, listen below as they talk more about the websites. (Transcript available at the bottom of this page)

If you need any help with either the Procurement Journey or the Supplier Journey you can contact the Best Practice team at procurement_development@gov.scot.

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For further information on public procurement in Scotland please visit www.gov.scot/procurement

Please email enquiries to scottishprocurement@gov.scot

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Multi-speaker Transcript:

Melissa: Welcome to the next Scottish Procurement and Property podcast. Today we’re joined by Lizanne and Paula from the Scottish Procurement Best Practice Team.Can you both tell us a bit about your roles?

Lizanne: Hi, thanks Melissa. I lead the best practice team within SG and we are responsible

for providing the procurement journey, the supplier journey and the PCIP assessment cycle and information sharing on that.

Melissa: Great stuff – and Paula?

Paula: Hi Melissa and Lizanne, I’m Paula I actually work for Lizanne in the best practice team. I’m primarily focused at looking at updates and changes that we make to the supplier journey and the procurement journey.

Melissa: Thank you both for joining us today. So we’re here today to discuss the procurement journey and the supplier journey which are two websites to support buyers and suppliers. And so first of all, Lizanne, could you give us a short overview of the procurement journey and its background?

Lizanne: Oh, gosh, the procurement journey has been on the go now I think about 12 years, and it’s really well embedded nationally in terms of its use and how buyers and organisations refer to it on a day to day basis.

Melissa: Thanks very much. And what about the supplier journey and it’s background?

Paula: Yeah well as Lizanne says, the Procurement Journey started first It was really embedded and well known and had been through a couple of updates you know, a new kind of EU regulations and things came out. So we had to basically re-write the whole procurement journey really. But we always had this feeling within the team that we really wanted to do something for suppliers and we didn’t feel we really had the guidance or the support that buyers were getting for suppliers.

So it was really pushed by ourselves and the team to say – Right, can we do something similar for suppliers?

And so we actually went out and did a survey and we got a brilliant response.

We got 1700 responses from suppliers of all different sizes, basically every category you could think of and we asked some basic questions like, actually, do you need something, Do you want something, what format would you want? And all that kind of thing. We got an overwhelming response. The suppliers came back saying, yes, please, we would like something.

And really what we found was a lot of suppliers have actually already been used in the procurement journey because it was so well-known, because it was so well liked and there was nothing else out there.

Melissa: So in terms of the scale, of users of both sites. So first of all, if we just stick with the supplier journey. Do you have any sort of information of how much it’s actually been used?

Paula: Yeah, well, at the moment it’s nowhere near as big as the procurement journey. I would say, first of all, but we actually have over 22,000 users we had last year and again, not quite as many countries as the procurement journey but not far behind. I think it’s Greenland seems to be the one that we need to get to. And there’s a few African countries, but actually for both sites, if you look at the Google Analytics, when we see a map of the world, basically every country just about is covered.

Melissa: And what about for the procurement journey then?

Lizanne: Quite a similar profile in terms of the countries. So we’ve got our top five are the UK, the US and India, Kenya and Australia. Yeah, but for the PJ we’re looking at annual usage of over 100,000 unique users, a figure which is substantial for such a product and I think it reflects well on the Scottish Government as a whole.

Melissa: Yeah that definitely ticks one of our outcomes for public procurement in Scotland being open and connected, I think both those tools are great examples of that.

Lizanne: and I think especially as well that’s a good point that, you know, there’s no there’s no barriers to anyone using the procurement journey or the supplier journey – they purposefully they are free.

Melissa: and so if we move on a bit, then to talk about some of the tools and features in both the websites for anybody who might not be familiar with them. So first of all, I think if we talk about the procurement journey as that’s been going for a bit longer and could you talk about some of the tools and features within that website?

Lizanne: something that’s incredibly important to us is that we keep smart user experience at the forefront of our minds. So it’s not just about, you know, having the best content but how you find the best content and how they can access it and use it. We’re always looking for feedback. There is a contact us button on the PJ.

Paula: So like checklists, quickfire guides, links to videos and kind of things that that were kind of really important. We have the search functionality always on every page for people to go straight to. We have a document library as well so that people would know there’s a document or a template they’re looking for they can go straight in that and there’s different filters they can use but there’s also the – if I’m not sure there’s a menu down the side that actually users can go through every single stage of the procurement process if they want to, or they can bypass and say, Well, I only want to look at receiving tenders or I only want to look at contract supplier management – so they can jump about. So it’s that kind of – we’re trying to encompass as much as we can and make it as easy for as many users as we possibly can.

Melissa: Brilliant. Thanks very much. And so just coming to the end, it would be great to hear from both of you an answer on what you’re most proud of for each of the websites.

Lizanne: I can honestly say that we’re proud of a lot. I think the fact that the procurement journey and supplier journey are so accessible to users at any time and that it makes us very accessible as a team. When people ask us for advice and guidance, I think the one of the biggest accolades that that we had recently when speaking to a couple of users was that it helped help them to be creative in how they approach procurement. And that’s a huge thing for us because it’s it’s not clinical legislation it’s about stimulating thought and talking about the application and the sharing of the best practice. It’s not a tick box exercise, procurement can no longer be that it’s far, far more. But how to approach that, how to do it is something that can’t be prescribed through legislation and policy, and that’s very difficult. So we offer support in quite a different sphere, which is really, really used and we’re very proud of that.

Paula: I think I think it was good for us is what we try to do is take a lot of a lot of things can be quite complicated or use a lot of acronyms and things. And we actually most of the team come from the background of having been buyers or category managers or whatever. So we have that practical experience both on the buying side, but also working with suppliers. We know the kind of questions that people have and do ask we do have a lot of links within the industry, within the team. So it’s quite good for for networking to find out how’s that working and hows this working.

Melissa: Brilliant! Thank you very much to both of you for taking part in the podcast. That was really interesting to find out more about both websites. For any listeners you can find both the sites online at the www.SupplierJourney.scot and www.ProcurementJourney.scot

So nice and easy and on both of those sites that as a contact form that you can use to get in touch with the team as well if you have any enquiries to send to them.

So thank you for listening and we’ll see you again soon.

Tags: buyers, podcast, Procurement Journey, supplier journey, Suppliers

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