E-procurement gaining ground

The use of electronic public procurement is proven to give substantial benefits both for administrations and businesses. Experiences from Norwegian public sector entities indicate a potential for 20-40 % time reductions on handling of orders, goods receipt and invoices, and between 2-10 % price reductions in operations related procurement expenditures. Yet, the biggest challenges to further savings are that leaders in public sector entities fail to engage themselves in their procurement activities. Consequently they fail to investigate the potential savings from handling their procurement related processes electronically, and they never come out of their start blocks.

These are some of the views expressed by Mr. André Hoddevik in an interview recently published in "eGov monitor Weekly". Mr. Hoddevik is Head of the eProcurement Secretariat which is responsible for following up on electronic public procurement activities on behalf of the Ministry of Government Administration and Reform in Norway, including the Ehandel.no portal. The full article can be found on www.egovmonitor.com/node/7221.

The use of the Norwegian Electronic Public Procurement Portal Ehandel.no is showing a steady growth. The latest activity report (February 2007) shows that the number of transactions in the last 12 months add up to more than 113 000. The number of transactions since the start up in 2002 have reached 238 000. The total throughput on Ehandel.no the last 12 months have been € 122 millions, adding up to more than € 246 millions since the first transactions took place in 2002.