Called GoProcure, the system is expected to handle several hundred thousand purchases worth $250 million annually from tens of thousands of businesses when it goes live next year.
Mr Mallard said GoProcure's main goal was reducing compliance costs for small and medium-sized businesses. Each will be able to sell to government departments through their own electronic catalogue hosted for free on a government computer, which public servants will access online.
He expects some supplier savings to be passed on to government buyers, as well as internal administrative efficiencies and purchasing economies from suppliers seeking to obtain a bigger chunk of government custom through GoProcure.
"Suppliers will be able to do good, big deals and I have an expectation of pencils being sharpened."
Mr Mallard was disappointed that few departments chose to fund and use GoProcure voluntarily after a pilot that ended in August.
Suppliers will be able to upload and update their electronic catalogues over the Internet and set separate terms and conditions and pricing for individual government buyers. They will have the alternative option of hosting electronic catalogues on their own systems.
Non-tech savvy small businesses, which provide one-off services to the government, could have their details and prices loaded into GoProcure by public servants who buy them, State Services Commission e-procurement project manager Greg Nicholls said.
While GoProcure could send and receive purchase orders and invoices to and from buyers and suppliers over the Net, an Internet connection would not be a prerequisite for selling to the government as the system could also automatically create and send out purchase orders by fax and text message, Mr Nicholls said.
Contract details have yet to be finalised, but GoProcure will be built by multinational Cap Gemini Ernst and Young using software from United States software firm Oracle at a cost of up to $7.5 million.
It will be paid for by a capital contribution to the State Services Commission, which Mr Mallard expected to recover over five years from fees paid by government agencies using the system.
Five departments will start using GoProcure in April and it will be progressively rolled out to the remaining 32 core government agencies from November 2003, as well as to other Crown entities which volunteer to adopt it.
While all transactions will have to go through the GoProcure hub, departments will be free to buy their own requisitioning software to manage internal processes such as authorising purchases and acknowledging the receipt of goods, or use GoProcure's requisitioning tool, Oracle iProcurement.
Police and the Defence Force – the most active government buyers – already have their own requisitioning software supplied by German company SAP.
Quelle: stuff
