From the Managing Director

Responding to increased expectations

2019 was a special year for us. During the early part of the year, we prepared for a change that took place in September: our merger with KL-Kuntahankinnat. Due to the merger, our customers now include the entire Finnish public administration, and we have new public procurement experts as our colleagues. It was hard work, but we prepared for the change with care and are now prepared to respond to the resulting increased expectations.

The preparation of public procurement processes for our new customers was started a bit early in joint procurement. Despite being extremely busy, our experts have done a great job, for which I would like to thank them. In future, we will focus on offering agreements for just the products or services that most of our customers need and that can be easily adapted to joint procurement.

Legal practice has become stricter in terms of the reporting of acquisitions, for which reason we have required, since last summer, that our customers join a framework agreement in advance. The advance joining requires from our customers preparation and anticipation of their acquisitions in the long term, which can sometimes be extremely difficult. We assist them to the best of our abilities by offering information on the previous use of our agreements and explaining our future tendering processes as early on as possible.

Our becoming Finland’s first service centre that serves all public organisations has clearly increased both our effectiveness and our responsibility for the development of public procurement. We have been pleased to see how interested our new customers are not only in joint procurement but also our expert services. We have already launched several projects to assist our customers in their tendering processes or develop procurement as a whole or an aspect of procurement together with a customer.

The Government Programme took a strong stand on the increase of responsibility requirements in public procurement. We were eager to seize this challenge. As it happens, in 2019, we developed a new, more extensive responsibility analysis for joint procurement and effectiveness indicators for customer-specific tendering. With these, we can do our part to improve the responsibility of public procurement and support our customers in the achievement of their strategic goals.

Our growth also obligates us to fine-tune our operating methods. We have therefore established a compliance function to collect all our internal instructions in one place and monitor compliance with the instructions. Our code of ethics has been the backbone of our operations for a long time, and I promise that this will also be the case in the future. Being fair and equal under all circumstances is extremely important to us.

We can begin 2020 in a situation where this organisation is starting to achieve its new form. Thanks to a roadshow arranged last autumn, we have also acquainted ourselves with many of our new customers. We will continue with these fruitful encounters. Our customer forum, which was launched in January, will also support the cooperation. We still have the same old service promise: achieving successful procurement together!

Anssi Pihkala
Managing Director