By Jo Best, 14 May 2007 12:51
NEWS
A number of public sector bodies have clubbed together to shave millions off the cost of their IT hardware.
Six NHS trusts and 14 councils used an e-procurement auction to find the cheapest suppliers for their tech kit, cutting almost £7m off a bill which could have cost £13.7m, according to non-auction benchmarks.
The auctions are the latest round of procurement exercises to be run by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and the London Centre of Excellence, and have saved more than £21m since their inception, according to the government.
The first e-procurement auctions were run in 2005 and have regularly seen savings of millions of pounds on hardware and software.
Today's announcement marks the seventh e-auction in which IT suppliers battle it out by offering the cheapest prices to meet combined government bodies' tech needs, with 325 already using the auction format for procurement.
Comments
There is 1 comment. Join the discussion
1. Simon
One question you have to ask is : does lowest price equal best value ?
The answer is : not neccessarily.
Even when the items is something that looks (at first site) to be a commodity, by squeezing margins you reduce the cash available to develop tomorrows items. So indirectly, such schemes wll have a detrimental effect on tomorrows products - but who cares, a different government will be in power by then so as far as the politicians are concerned "it's going to be someone elses problem"