Procurement development interests the Parliamentary Office

In the KEINO Academy, the procurement units study together how public procurement should be managed to make it even more effective. In the midst of study and discussions, the procurement services of the Parliamentary Office’s service centre got excited about developing procurement roughly a year and a half ago. They have since taken big leaps in it.

“We started off with electronic tools, Procurement Radar and Procurement Pulse. They told us what the starting level of our procurement and purchasing was,” recalls Anri Rantala, Legal Counsel from the Parliamentary Office.

The procurement Radar is a tool for assessing the maturity of procurement, and the Procurement Pulse displays information on purchases made. These provide a preliminary overall picture of the status of the management of procurement.

“The eagerness to develop and the ideas of our procurement team who participated in the KEINO Academy were acknowledged in our organisation as well, and the Secretary-General of Parliament launched a procurement development project in February 2021,” Rantala reviews the start. Hansel’s project manager Tuula Risikko and development manager Ville Hietanen joined the project to conduct a further analysis of the current situation, based on which they also gave proposals for development.

Proposal ideas from interviews

The employees of the Parliamentary Office were strongly involved in the procurement development project. They gathered information on the status of procurement and the related thoughts of those preparing them in 47 interviews. Some of these were group discussions; some were individual interviews. The thorough survey brought out opinions and ideas, and it was used to find a common direction for development.

The fast-paced project, which was implemented in April–June, resulted in a 26-page final report to which the Parliament’s people added a significant number of attachments such as results from the Procurement Radar and the Procurement Pulse.

“We were truly surprised by how quickly and how much we managed to get things done together. We gained nearly 40 actual development proposals, which Hansel employees presented to the project’s steering group,” Anri Rantala says describing the progress.

There were many proposals, and their prioritisation was the next step.

Strategic targets help procurement managers

“Some of the proposals were easy to introduce immediately; others need more time. Some proposals led to the reorganisation of the Office’s procurement,” says Rantala.

To help define the strategic targets, the Parliamentary Office launched the third electronic tool, the Procurement Pilot. “The Procurement Pilot is based on the national strategy for procurement, and it was a great help in devising our own procurement strategy. With the tool, a large group of us got to assess which targets were key to our procurement specifically,” says Rantala.

For now, the procurement unit’s project culminated in February 2022 with the Office Commission’s approval of a new procurement strategy for the Office for 2022–2025. At the same time, the Office’s procurement rules were updated and renewed. Next, the procurement strategy will be introduced to different departments of the Office, and the Office will thus continue to develop its procurement systematically and purposefully.

“A large ship turns slowly but surely,” Rantala sums it up.