What Can I Do Now?
You can use the Catalogue to show what’s on offer including a useful level of technical, service and pricing detail. You can use the information to better understand what’s available to you and plan your future procurement activity. You can access the services listed, all of them can be purchased with your own funds or funding you have secured from elsewhere, some services are supported currently by central contracts, in place during the COVID-19 epidemic to support rapid deployment of key capability to practices such as Video Conferencing.
If you are ordering services with your own funds at this time then you will need to complete the Order Form to complete the contract with your supplier. This is an offline, a manual process at this time (please see Order Form).
When Can I Access My Allocated Budget?
We are working to change the process for releasing this with you, which was set to be aligned to assisted Foundation procurement activity. We recognise that this may not be something you wish to undertake within the short to medium term, and therefore we are replanning our approach.
At present we are looking at how we can begin to release the allocation to CCGs however in order to free up funds into the allocation we will need to address the fact that the various Continuity Call Off Agreements reflect a significant overspend against the fair share allocation level in the case of around a quarter of CCGs.
We hope to bring more detail of a proposal for CCGs which addresses both a revised approach to procurement support and a revised timeline for allocation release, but for now we are targetting the summer for releasing funds and enabling CCGs to place orders using allocated central budgets.
How Long Does A Procurement Take?
A direct award could conceiveably be completed within a day or less - following the process guidance and completing a simple Order Form it should be possible to have contracted for the Solution within a few hours. Future releases of the Catalogue will increasingly create a digital purchasing journey so that this can be undertaken as a straight through process on the Catalogue.
The Further Competition On-Catalogue may be accessed by buyers in advance of the supporting Catalogue functionality using the guidance as set out. It should take between one day and one week to reach a decision and complete and a procurement through this method.
The Further Competition Off-Catalogue process will take longer depending on the complexity of your needs and environment, but schedule between 30 and 90 days.
When Do We Expect to Look at Reprocurement of Our Foundation Systems?
Clearly it would be unreasonable to expect CCGs to move through a reprocurement cycle for something so fundamental as their Foundation System under these conditions. We shall therefore set aside the previous plans for the large scale managed reprocurement cycle which saw us ensuring each CCG moved through reprocurement over about an 18 month period.
We shall instead review the timescales associated with our core procurement support as well as the contract timetable and offer and present a revised timetable and approach. We shall do this as soon as we have determined how we can add most benefit in the short term and are better able to predict the time it will take to exit into better circumstances.