Scottish Government

This indicator examines the effectiveness of the procurement function by assessing the perceptions of the customers of the procurement function - that is, those within the organisation who rely on the procurement function to provide advice or assistance when procuring goods and services (for example where there is departmental devolved purchasing authority, or in areas that are not generally viewed as 'pure' procurement such as care commissioning, or construction projects), as well as those who rely on the procurement function for practical goods (office supplies, transport, etc.).

To ensure consistency and allow this indicator to be comparable across all public bodies, a standard customer satisfaction questionnaire has been provided ( Annex 1).

This facility will not be available until late 2008. Therefore this BPI is on hold until then. Organisations are not expected to issue these questionnaires until then.

A web-based function will be added to the reporting tool to allow each organisation to identify the customers that should receive the automatically generated questionnaire. The procurement function (or in smaller organisations, the procurement lead will simply be asked to provide the email addresses of the individual customers that should be approached to give feedback on the standard of the procurement service and on the goods, works or services that have been procured and delivered in the past year.

For organisations - 'customer' should be a balanced selection of organisation employees who use or come into contact with the procurement function, e.g. budget holders or managers, ordinary workers, project leaders, etc.

For Centres of Expertise - 'customer' should be a balanced selection of key contacts and/or contract users within member organisations.

This questionnaire will be automatically generated from the Hub each organisation's specifically identified customer group, starting August 2008.

The questionnaire is divided into three sections:

indicates the level of visibility of the procurement function - are employees aware of the procurement function and do they understand its basic role.

indicates how accessible procurement advice or guidance is to employees.

indicates the quality and user friendliness of the advice or guidance provided by the procurement function.

indicates that employees are aware of formal contracts. A low score here may be an indication of high maverick spend and should be balanced against the score to BPI 5 (% procurement spend on contract).

indicates that effectiveness of the procurement function at working closely with customers and understanding that changes to contracts may affect their working practices and communicating such changes promptly is important.

indicates the perception of quality of contracts negotiated by the procurement function.

indicates the user-friendliness of the organisation's systems for ordering goods and services.

indicates the accuracy or orders (P2P accuracy).

overall satisfaction rating.

perception of improvement or otherwise of procurement function.

The questionnaire will also have a free text comment field to allow respondents to make specific comments that they wish the procurement function to be aware of.

Annually

Local Organisation and automatically generated electronic questionnaire from the Hub.

Local Organisation

Local

Organisations should seek to increase the proportion of customers agreeing with the statements in the questionnaire.

Questionnaire scores can offer insight into reasons why other BPI scores may be low. For example Q6 should be balanced against BPI 1 to ensure that a good efficiency score has not detrimentally affected the quality of the service and products provided by the procurement function. Also, Q1-Q5 may indicate communications problems that adversely affect compliance and encourage maverick spend.