Procurement

About: Procurement is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 25669 publications have been published within this topic receiving 334145 citations.

Partnerships and public procurement: building social capital through supply relations

Abstract: As one means of dealing with an increasingly interdependent or shared power ‘noone in charge’ world (Bryson and Crosby 1992) and adapting the public sector to the demands of the global economy, successive administrations in the UK have aimed to develop a more strategic approach to public procurement by emphasizing inter–departmental co–ordination and establishing long–term partnership relations with suppliers. This has proved to be a difficult task, however, as the operating framework and culture of the public sector have hindered the development of interorganizational relationships and trust. By focusing on the co–operative processes and interaction within central government departments and between departments and the private sector, this paper aims to analyse and identify the obstacles to, and opportunities for, implementing long–term supply relations and facilitating departmental co–ordination. While the paper argues that partnership relations can build social capital, it also shows that these resources can have both positive and negative effects for public procurement. To conclude, lessons for developing collaborative arrangements in public procurement are identified.

Allocating Costs in a Collaborative Transportation Procurement Network

Abstract: We study a logistics network in which shippers collaborate and bundle their shipment requests to negotiate better rates with a common carrier. In this setting, shippers can identify collaborative routes with decreased overall empty truck movements. After the optimal routes that minimize total cost of covering all the shippers' demands are determined, this cost is allocated among the shippers. Our goal is to devise cost-allocation mechanisms that ensure the sustainability of the collaboration. We first develop cost-allocation mechanisms with well-known properties from the cooperative game theory literature, such as budget balance, stability, and cross-monotonicity. Next, we define a set of new properties, such as a guaranteed discount from the standalone cost for each shipper, desirable in our setting, and propose several cost-allocation schemes that could lead to implementable solutions. We also perform a computational study on randomly generated and real-life data to derive insights on the performance of the developed allocation schemes.

Comparing procurement methods for design-build projects

Abstract: The design-build delivery method is increasingly used in the United States due to numerous advantages it can offer a project. An important issue associated with design-build delivery is the procurement method used to select the design-build team. It is a critical decision that involves several key project team members, including the owner, designer, and contractor organizations, and requires the owner to carefully choose the design-build procurement method that will be used to select the team that will deliver the project. This research quantitatively analyzed the correlation between the design-build procurement method and the performance of the design-build project with regard to cost, time, and quality metrics. The procurement methods studied were sole source, qualifications-based, best value, and low bid selection. Data were collected through surveys from 76 design-build projects in the United States. Based on the patterns and relationships identified from these data, a better understanding of the procurement process and how it influences project performance is achieved. The impact of project-specific factors and guidelines are presented to assist owners in selecting the design-build team procurement method that responds to their project goals.