What is Coordinated Procurement?

The next question people often have is, do I have to use whole of government panels that have been established as a coordinated procurement? And the answer is yes.

If you look at 4.12 of the CPR, then NCCEs or non-corporate Commonwealth entities, which are basically all departments and agencies, must use coordinated procurements, unless of course you can get an exemption. If you read what you need to do to get an exemption, I have two words for you. Good luck.

Basically, long story short, coordinated procurements, a whole of government panels and arrangements set up to assist all of the government.

They are good at things because they often ensure that the government gets substantial discounts.

As an example, there's a whole of government Microsoft panels, soon to be VSA 5 under that panel, when an agency procures Microsoft products, they get the benefit of substantial discounts.

Let me just jump onto the finance website and show you a list of the current panels.

From the finance website, you can see that there are numerous panels around, or that are comprised of different types of services. Business advisory services, obviously air services, accommodation, travel, et cetera.

Now, hopefully on the finance website, it gives you an overview as to whether they are mandated or not. Sometimes, there are various exceptions. But generally, the answer is yes, they are.

For instance, there's a new management advisory services panel that's just been established. And as you can see, it's mandated for agencies and departments and opt ins for other Commonwealth businesses.

But this finance page is a good one to use, and I'll refer to it. I'll put a link to it in the video so that you can actually see what the coordinated procurements are out there.

What are the coordinated procurements out there that you can or that you should avail yourself of? Meaning, if you need to buy any of these sorts of goods and services for your department or agency, then you must use these panels, unless you can get one of those exemptions.

There we go. Now, there's a whole list of them here. So as I said, I will provide a link to this finance page so that you can access these panels, or actually you can get access to this information to see which panels you may need to use. There's the Microsoft one I was talking about before.