Good practice:

Central Public Procurement of Intermunicipal Community Medio Tejo (CC-CIMT)

The Intermunicipal Community of Medio Tejo is an association of 13 municipalities from Medio Tejo region. The CC-CIMT was set up with the aim of developing a common electronic purchasing system for the Municipalities to obtain financial / procedural savings. It is a centralised trading and contracting system for the acquisition of a standardised set of goods/services. This supra-municipal level approach obliges companies to adopt a strategy of digital transformation and adapting to more agile procurement processes wider including the adoption of framework agreements, facilitating the procedures developed by the acceding entities and promoting free and transparent access for companies.

For companies, the CC-CIMT has addressed the following benefits:
-The public procurement procedure is faster;
-Standardisation of procedures between contracting entities;
-Prior knowledge of joint negotiations beforehand;
-Absence of costs access to or use of solutions for public procurement;
-Free and cost-free access to the parts of the contracting procedures.
Company service providers must establish digital procurement procedures to comply with requirements from framework agreements in terms of timelines, prices, services quality, among others.

The CC-CIMT is an opportunity for public authorities/companies adopt competences in the area of electronic acquisitions and public procurement at large scale, presenting itself as fundamental role for the region and its stakeholders.

The initial implementation had a budget of 121.000 EUR in 3 years period and a further 18.000 EUR investment for new integrations (EFDR funding). Also a management team of 4 persons (project coordinator and 3 others categories) and 2 additional consulting units can provide further assistance.

In the first 3 years the CC-CIMT procurement process achieved more than 3 Milion Eur and savings of 225.000 Eur.
About 257 companies are registered in the suppliers’ database.
The practice was replicated within other Intermunicipal Communities in Portugal.

The implementation process of electronic public procurement is associated with high and complexed levels of legislation. There are also difficulties to increase the number of companies registered in the database in a variety of services and goods.

This practice was already transferred among others Intermunicipal Communities in Centro region of Portugal (eg. https://centraldecompras.cim-regiaodecoimbra.pt/ ). Some key factors for a transfer includes:
- the level of accountability (number of tenders, number of service providers, savings in Eur for public authorities, volume of contracts for companies per service/good, etc )must be kept updated in order to highlight the evolution along the project duration and all benefits for the regional economy.
- an important factor is the Informative Portal Medio Tejo (MT.com) which allows all companies to communicate their selling conditions to potential public buyers increasing visibility.
- principles of transparency and efficiency – service providers are selected according to specific criteria defined by CIMT.
- different topics/themes can be added to the electronic central public procurement to potentiate relevant needs, such as circular economy principles or innovation procurement