Good practice:

Central purchasing systems – Alentejo´s region case

Central purchasing systems are centralised negotiation and purchasing systems available for contracting authorities and managed by public or private entities or public services.
Under the terms of Portuguese Law, No 111-B/2017, central purchasing systems are intended to award tenders for the execution of public works contracts, the supply of movable goods and the provision of services, at the request and on behalf of the contracting authorities, to conclude framework agreements, known as public supply contracts, the object of which is subsequently to award public works contracts or the rental or purchase of movable property or the purchase of services, set up dynamic purchasing systems for the use of the contracting authorities, setup electronic catalogues for the contracting authorities, etc.
Intermunicipal Central purchasing systems currently cover 33 municipalities from 3 intermunicipal communities and more than 100 suppliers, but they may also cover entities that need to follow the Public Contracts Code rules, namely municipal services and others, as long as they manifest their interest, which includes the adhesion to its principles and the acceptance of the Regulation and the execution rules. Each intermunicipal community coordinates its own system and the municipalities can choose if they implement public procurement themselves or as part of a call for tenders issued by the central purchasing system.

The Central purchasing systems projects are financed by the regional financing programme - Alentejo 2020. Staff resources from CIM´s (intermunicipal communities) - 1 or 2 per CIM - and capacitation of this staff are a key aspect to deliver these specific projects.

The Intermunicipal Central purchasing systems make possible to aggregate the common needs of the municipalities, to define the procedures to be launched, development of Framework Agreements and definition of contractual relations. The average saving are around 20% when compared to when the procedures are performed by an entity by itself. For example, Baixo Alentejo central system saved around 602.326,00€ in 57 procurements and Alentejo Litoral system saved 1.683.368,00€ in 53 procurements.

Public norms and standards, lack of national circular public procurement regulation and others related to it can be an obstacle and the major challenge.

These systems are prepared to include innovative criteria in order to meet environmental challenges. The learning potential are relevant since central purchasing systems are an opportunity to the implementation of circular procurement since they represent not only an advantage to costs reducing but also will facilitate and speed up the execution of procedures, meeting the concerns of municipalities regarding processes simplification, structures optimisation, competencies development, management and efficiency in the application of resources - without jeopardising quality and service levels. The quality is guaranteed through strategic negotiation which is based on greater negotiating power and processes standardisation.The intermunicipal communities that works with these systems are more able and have more resources when compared with smaller entities to start a circular procedure with circularity criteria. This can be a solution for the full implementation of circular procurement.