Tools for better management of procurement

Hansel aims to increase the transparency of administration and assist its customers in developing their procurement with a variety of tools. In 2019, three services were offered free of charge: Procurement Radar, Procurement Pulse and Explore Public Spending at Tutkihankintoja.fi. If a customer wishes to analyse data more thoroughly or if procurement development is required, Hansel’s experts can help.

In August, we published a new electronic tool for procurement development. Procurement Radar is a tool that can be used to assess the maturity of an organisation’s procurement. It assists in identifying key development areas and assessing good procurement practices from the perspectives of the different stakeholders and in relation to other organisations.

It is a self-assessment tool for public sector procurement. Procurement Radar consists of a short and a long survey, as well as reporting. Respondents include not only procurement experts but also other experts and the management of the organisation. Procurement Radar is offered completely free of charge for Hansel’s customers through Hansel’s online service.

Procurement Pulse knows procurement

Introduced in 2018, Procurement Pulse collects the procurement data of an organisation into a whole that is easier to manage. The first regional authority customers were able to study the analyses provided by Procurement Pulse in the autumn of 2019.

Participants of the KEINO Academy, which focuses on the development of sustainable and innovative procurement management, studied their own procurement from a variety of perspectives. A carbon footprint indicator was piloted as a new indicator. It was more broadly taken into use at the beginning of 2020.

Procurement Pulse is a visualised service at the contracting authority level. It keeps track of, for example, what was purchased, from which supplier and when.

Cities included in award-winning procurement data service

Purchase account data of the cities of Helsinki and Vantaa was published on Tutkihankintoja.fi in November. The Explore Public Spending service at Tutkihankintoja.fi is an easy-to-use online service open to anyone where acquisitions made with tax revenue can be studied from a variety of perspectives. When the service was launched in September 2017, it only included data for the central government. The introduction of the first cities further expands the transparency of the administrative sector.

When designing Tutkihankintoja.fi, special attention was paid to making the search feature easy to use and the site visually pleasing. These goals were reached even better than expected, and the Finnish pioneering online service that brings together public administration and citizens has been noticed around the world.

Procurement data was already publicly available before by virtue of the Act on the Openness of Government Activities, but a data request had to be submitted to a specific organisation in order to study the data. This impeded access to the information and consumed the resources of both the party requesting the data and the organisation receiving the request. The information is now available in a clear format in a single service.