Government of Jersey Procurement function (FOI)

Request

A

How many dedicated FTE procurement officers do you have within the authority?

B

How many officers have a formal CIPS accreditation and how many are working towards CIPS accreditation?

C

What is the total spend of the Authority in the last financial year?

D

What percentage of the spend are the Procurement officers able to influence?

E

How many Tenders and RFQs do the team handle on average per year (please base this over the last 5 years to take account of the pandemic skew)?

F

How (if at all) do you measure the performance of the authority’s procurement officers? Examples might be:

i) Time taken from receiving the first request to purchase to the placement of order, 

ii) Cost reduction / avoidance achieved from first offer to order placement, 

iii) Cost this year compared with last year, or 

iv) Number of requisitions processed

G

Where accounts payable is managed in-house does this function ever sit within the remit of a procurement or commercial specialisation?

H

Do you use any specific metric(s) to govern the size of your procurement team, and if so what are they?

Response 

A

There are 14 full time permanent posts of which either are currently filled, leaving six vacancies, of which one is allocated to an interim officer. It is and has been traditionally difficult to recruit qualified Procurement officers in Jersey, hence the number of vacancies within the substantive team. In order to manage demand and provide a service to the wider Government there is in place a Professional Services Framework agreement from which qualified procurement specialists to support and augment the substantive team can be contracted for:-

• Business As Usual demand due to the vacant posts; 
• Major projects as and when required, based on the demand across the Government.

B

One officer has formal CIPS accreditation, and six other officers are working towards the qualification.

C

The Annual Report and Accounts provide a clear breakdown of how public money is spent by the Government of Jersey and can be accessed via the link below:  

Annual Report and Accounts for the States of Jersey (gov.je)

D

The Government of Jersey Public Finances Manual, which is law, requires Procurement to be influencing spend across all parts of Government, the amount of spend influenced changes from one year to the next, due to the scope of projects agreed each year, the number of contracts that require renewing, and the resource capacity available at any given time.

E

On average the Government of Jersey published 107 Tenders and RFQ’s per year between 2018 to 2022. These opportunities were advertised through the e-portal (Proactis). In addition to these, there will be a high number of RFQs which are not mandated to go through the portal. 

F

The Government of Jersey actively monitors the status of individual procurement projects in conjunction with stakeholders across the wider government, to ensure that these projects are seen through to fruition. Key procurement measures such as those set out in the request will be considered for implementation in 2024 as the data that is being collected via the new SAP solution once it becomes available.

G

Accounts Payable is managed in house. It does not sit within the procurement / commercial structure. However, there is a close relationship between the business support team and accounts payable to ensure that queries are effectively managed. There is an e-ticketing solution which ensures queries are sent to the correct area and are dealt with in a timely manner.

H

The size of the Team is broadly based upon the Government of Jersey organisational structure (number of departments and categories of spend) this is augmented by project specific resources for large capital programmes in which the costs are attributed to the programme.