Open market engagement and ongoing dialogue

Home

Introduction

How to use this toolkit

What is Open SPP?

What our users told us

Plan

Establish an enabling environment

Prioritize

Monitoring & evaluation

Build support and capabilities

Create an Action Plan

Implement

Assess needs

Choose a procurement method

Engage with the market

Set sustainability criteria

Prepare contract obligations

Monitor implementation

Open data & measuring progress

Resources

What are they?

Market Engagement practices allow procurement practitioners to engage with prospective suppliers during the procurement planning stage. Provisions that allow for ongoing consultation give procurement officials the option of discussing and negotiating with suppliers during the procurement process, once the contact notice has been published. This procurement mechanism is sometimes referred to as a “Competitive Dialogue” (this is a European model that has been adopted also in Peru, and has been proposed in Chile).

How do they relate to SPP?

When implementing sustainable procurement, engaging with the market is essential to inform your decisions regarding what sustainability criteria to include in the procurement process. This will help ensure that the criteria can be met by many suppliers, without leaving out SMEs or local companies

Market Engagement

Ensuring that there are provisions that allow for the implementation of Market Engagement practices, such as the use of Prior Information Notices (PINs) will facilitate the assessment of available sustainable alternatives in the market. This practice will inform, during the procurement planning stage, to what extent sustainability criteria can be included as technical specifications or award criteria during the procurement process. However, it is important to ensure that procurement practitioners have clarity over what constitutes compliant and effective market engagement in the context of SPP.

Prior Information Notices (PINs) are a tool to notify the market of your intention to award a contract and initiate discussions with potential suppliers, allowing you to assess the availability of sustainable alternatives and gather information for development of the tender specifications.

Ongoing consultation

Ensuring that there are provisions that include open disclosure of information or ongoing dialogue during the procurement process can be especially useful for outcome-based and performance-based procurement. These types of procurement allow practitioners to set environmental and social desired outcomes and establish a dialogue with suppliers to discuss and negotiate possible solutions.

For more information on market engagement practices see section Engage with the supplier market. To learn more about procurement approaches that include ongoing consultation practices, see section on Choose a procurement method.