A new way to tell suppliers about future procurement opportunities
Procurement is more effective when you provide an early heads up to suppliers about upcoming opportunities. It allows businesses to understand the potential pipeline of work coming from buyers and prepare in advance.
Until now, agencies have provided this information via the Annual Procurement Plans (APPs) published every six months. However, after feedback from both agencies and businesses, we have decided to enable procurement teams to provide early warning to businesses on an ongoing basis by publishing future procurement opportunities (FPO) via GETS.
An FPO is provided by agencies to alert suppliers to potential upcoming procurement activities.
An FPO is not a commitment by an agency to procure the goods and/or services, but signals to the market potential future activity to ensure that prospective suppliers can be prepared, informed and engaged with the procurement activity.
Agencies can update their FPOs as the project progresses and generate more certainty for businesses. In addition, an FPO could signal a project where multiple activities are upcoming, similar to an advance notice to market.
An interested supplier can subscribe to an FPO and follow it as the opportunity progresses. This allows an agency to identify suppliers for early market engagement.
FPOs in GETS work in a similar way to other RFx types. We will provide instructions via Hīkina to help you complete these. This is live with immediate effect and the FPO notices are made available to suppliers in a similar way to other RFx notices.
Good planning and market engagement are critical success factors for procurement. FPOs will help you and your agencies do both of these in a more effective and flexible way than the traditional APP.
In addition, we are committed to updating the GETS platform. This will start with back end improvements that will improve the stability and scalability of the system then followed by changes to the look and feel of the system. These improvements will make GETS more user friendly and introduce greater functionality. We will provide you with more information as work progresses.