Global economy, local pressures & poor financial Government performance are forcing Greek Public Organizations to develop new strategies for achieving “more with less”. Therefore, a year after year improvement in productivity and reduction of costs becomes imperative. As a result of that, many Institutions and Public Organizations have to see now with a strategic eye, something that historically was a tactical function: Public Procurement.
The amount of money that the Public Education Institutions and especially the “Third Level Education Institutions” (AEI) spend annually goes to a wide variety of goods and services. It covers purchasing from low value, low risk items routinely bought such as stationery, up to the high value, high risk purchases such selecting a partner to provide the Campus I.T. and Telecom infrastructure. It is also not just about what AEI buy, but also about how they buy it.
Phenomena such as waste of money in unnecessary purchases, buying in excess above needs, duplication of supplies, long-lasting tenders, administration frustration and frictions with suppliers are common in the market of education.
We will investigate a structured way for the whole cycle of supply chain, aiming to reduce costs and increase productivity and transparency.
The project MIDAS includes a new approach, looking at nature of Purchases and categorizing them to four areas, according to Kraljic model (Strategic, Leverage, Commodity and Bottleneck). As every area impacts differently the annual procurement plan (E.P.P.) -budget wise and procedure wise-, we will proceed with four research packages addressing the issue of the evaluation of the performance of the Strategic Suppliers, the Optimization of the various aspects of eAuctions and the development of a methodology to measure the administrative cost of purchases. Following the research packages, two pilot projects will follow (eAuctions and eOrdering), as a Proof of Concept of the Research packages.
The project is financed form the General Secretariat of Research and Technology and the EU