Public Procurement and Property
Sustainable Procurement Tools – Prioritisation exercise case study
April 17, 2025 by Teigan Kelly No Comments | Category Procurement news, Scottish Procurement
The Sustainable Procurement Tools have been designed to help public sector organisations identify and address how they can optimise the economic, social and environmental outcomes of their procurement activity. This blog describes a recent update to the Prioritisation Tool and also how Fife Council have used a prioritisation approach to achieve positive procurement outcomes.
Prioritisation Tool update
The prioritisation tool is designed to assist early-stage strategic planning through the consideration of economic, environmental and social wellbeing, and brings a standard, structured approach to the assessment of spend categories. Prioritisation can help to ensure appropriate focus on identified priorities within public bodies and category/commodity planning. It can help inform procurement strategies as well as pre-procurement market engagement.
In response to user feedback, an enhancement was recently applied to the prioritisation tool giving users the flexibility to focus on a sub-set of the environmental and socio-economic factors. When creating a new prioritisation, public bodies or commodity teams have the option to deselect some of the factors, enabling them to run a targeted version, for example, to focus on specific issues such as climate.
Fife Council – Prioritising Climate and Procurement
The latest addition to the Sustainable Procurement Tools website is a case study detailing how Fife Council have used the Sustainable Procurement Tools to identify opportunities to address climate change through procurement, and as a result of this have achieved an improved Procurement and Commercial Improvement Programme (PCIP) score. This approach will help those who have responsibility for key categories and contracts to understand where to focus effort to achieve the most positive outcomes.
The use of the Prioritisation Tool, available on the Sustainable Procurement Tools website, to review commodity categories has ensured a standard, structured approach and identified areas of focus in terms of category and commodity planning.
The Council’s approach supports the Council’s economic, social and environmental objectives.
The prioritisation exercise provides:
- an audit trail showing alignment from national and organisational objectives to priorities within categories and projects
- clarity on relevant risks and opportunities within category and project strategies, and confidence to draw out key risks and opportunities in contracts and frameworks
- stakeholder understanding and capability
- market and supplier engagement and development opportunities
- a structured plan to ensure resources are focused where the most positive outcomes are deliverable
Find out more about Fife Council’s approach on the Case Studies section of the Sustainable Procurement Tools website.
The case study shares lessons learned. If you are a public body and would like to share an example of how your organisation addressed sustainability matters in a procurement exercise, please email scottishprocurement@gov.scot.
Further sources of support
Our Sustainable Procurement Tools have been designed to help public sector organisations identify and address how they can optimise the economic, social and environmental outcomes of their procurement activity. This new product complements the existing materials already available on the Sustainable Procurement Tools, listed below:
Tags: Prioritisation Tool, Scottish Procurement, sustainable procurement tools
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