Compass provides our online interactive procurement advice and guidance service for clients and design professionals.
The resources section provides information on procurement portals, legislation and regulations, the threshold values, specific guidance and training, standard PQQ documents, Government services for reporting bad procurement practices along with portals for international architectural competitions and design contests.
This section also currently provides general guidance on legal definitions, common terms, an explanation of the changes to the Public Contract Regulations 2015 along with a series of briefing papers on various topics of relevance, such as the ESPD and Brexit.
Under publications a number of general and specific guides for holding competition procedures, along with Project Compass research and policy papers are provided for free download.
Design & Team Procurements
Guidance structured around two primary streams for selecting construction solutions under UK and EU criteria, is being developed after analysis of client needs. Based on two primary services (depending on the procedure adopted) “Compass”, will deal with Design Contest competitions, and “Compass Light” will addresses all other open and restricted bids. This will also be supplemented by a further system addressing procurements developed under instruments for design build, finance and operate.
These are being structured around a simple sequence of interrogative questions which procurers are asked to consider. Adherence to best practice guidance is rewarded by contributing towards their recognised certification. Confidentiality is also key, especially names and contact information to ensuring that where tenders information is not for publication in the public domain, all information can remain confidential.
DIY Procurement Procedure Notices
Publicly accessible software will be made available that enables the client to set out their procurement notice using a simple online format. They are provided with legal and procedural guidelines, sample questions and assessment methodologies, and an opportunity to have their procedure notices health checked before publication. This can then be customised with logos, graphics etc., as the client may wish, and uploaded and published to a prepared website containing all requisite information for the procurement, through which the process may be managed forwards. This can diminish the need to have in-house expertise, be up to date with directives and their detail, know how to go about publishing procurement notices and receiving expressions of interest, PQQs, and ITTs, and puts the client/end user in greater control of the procurement.
The ambition is to provide a more efficient and effective standard process and procedure that can shift emphasis away from the procedures towards a projects ambitions with better briefing, which can better allow and stimulate more specific procurement, avoid many one size fits all and aggregated approaches to procurement.