Plan

In developing your organisation’s commercial strategy you should think about your overall approach to ensure that all procurements and other commercial activities (e.g. income generation) collectively achieve the intended organisational outcomes, and represent social, cultural, environmental and economic value.

This should include:

• Demonstrating how all commercial activities and agreements (e.g. contracts, grants or both) align to the organisation’s wider strategic objectives;
• Anticipating and responding to uncertainty, by ensuring (or having a clear and realistic plan to ensure) there’s sufficient organisational capability, capacity and resilience to address unplanned demands;
• Multidisciplinary and cross-functional teams collaboratively developing a shared understanding of what’s required to achieve the required outcomes, and the agreements that need to be proactively managed and monitored to support this;
• Surfacing any operational issues relating to any agreements, and ensuring clear ownership is assigned to address these in a timely manner;
• Leveraging commercial activities to diversify the public sector supply market across Wales, helping to promote healthy markets by balancing short- and medium-term needs while safeguarding the ability to also meet the long-term needs of supply sectors, and to encourage innovation; and
• Establishing a consistent and proportionate approach to managing risk and reward incentives.

A pipeline notice is one of a number of new transparency requirements that public sector organisations will need to comply with from 28 October 2024, when the new Procurement Act 2023 comes into effect.

Greater transparency of procurement pipelines increases the visibility of planned contracts in Wales and its local regions, allowing businesses and social enterprises more time to prepare. This will support lowering some of the barriers that prevent small Welsh enterprises from bidding for public contracts.

Being transparent about future needs in advance of starting procurement activities:

• Is a vital element of effective and ongoing market engagement;
• Supports working with a responsive market of companies; and
• Supports businesses in Wales to thrive.

Pipeline notices support a number of intended outcomes of the Wales Procurement Policy Statement, including:

• Contracting authorities should publish their procurement pipelines so that opportunities for collaborative procurement can be identified; and
• Transparency is embedded by default into each stage of the procurement lifecycle, through the implementation of the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS).

Embedding transparency in public procurement is also one of the UK Government’s stated aims of the Procurement Act 2023, and publishing notices throughout the end-to-end procurement journey will be central to achieving this.

At this ‘Plan’ stage of the procurement journey, public sector organisations that intend to procure more than £100 million of goods, services and works in a given financial year, will be required to publish a pipeline notice containing information on their potential future procurements that year (where the estimated value for a particular contract exceeds £2 million).

In developing your commercial strategy, you’ll have already considered how your organisation can help promote healthy markets over the short, medium and long term.

You should build on this as part of your market strategy to include different approaches to market management. This is about developing and maintaining a good understanding of the markets that you source from, and appreciating how the commercial activities of the Welsh public sector collectively can influence these markets.

Flexible, risk-based approaches to market management leads to:

• More competitive markets;
• More innovation in product development and service delivery;
• Fewer situations where organisations are over reliant on one or a small number of suppliers; and
• Improved social value for money and wellbeing outcomes.

Sharing market intelligence and insights with fellow commercial and procurement practitioners in the Cyd community, will further support better market management across the whole public sector in Wales.

• Foundational Economy Online Learning Resource (there are 8 sections to this course and it’s recommended to complete the module in one sitting, which will take between 30 – 45 minutes. It’s particularly recommended for people involved in developing economic policies and projects, and those working in public sector procurement. The course is designed to leave learners feeling more informed and confident)