Having spent the entire day at school, I returned home. Me and my friends, we went to dinner and celebrated my birthday. After a long and hectic day, I went to sleep at 1 am.

Module 1 and 2 were all about the introduction on public procurement and co-operative purchasing. Public procurement refers to purchasing goods and services for public agencies. I learned that all the government organization under municipal, provincial, federal government that operates to serve public interest are classified as public agencies such as Police, fire fighters, healthcare, education and military and security.

One of the valuable understanding from these modules was knowing about how theses organization operates and where they get financial support from. It was a delightful experience to discover that the taxes that I pay somewhere contributes and help the public agencies to operate. We also cover some interesting findings on types of co-operative purchasing. I personally like the concept of cooperative purchasing as it allows organization to combine their purchasing power and save great deal time and cost while increasing the efficiency and productivity. I believe that if the challenges are overcome and, mutual respect and consideration is demonstrated, cooperative purchasing can help organizations foster financially.

To begin with, The Boarder Public Sector (BPS) are the agencies that receives funding from the government but are not part of the government such as Hospitals, Universities, colleges, etc. Boarder Public Sector Procurement Directive is a set of guidelines for BPS agencies that received ten million dollars or more of public funds in previous fiscal year.The original BPS Procurement Directive became effective on July 1, 2011 and was recently updated on January 1st, 2024. My insights into BPS directive is that, these set of guidelines are crucial as they maintain transparency and liability in procurement processes. The BPS organizations are directed throughout each stage of the procurement process by directive, making the procurement processes less complicated and equitable. The Boarder Public Sector Procurement Directive is based on the five key principles that allows organizations to maximize the value received from the public funds. These key principles are accountability, transparency, value for money, quality service delivery and process standardization. The BPS organizations are required to comply with all 25 mandatory procurement policies and procedure under directive.

Considering all the mandatory policies, the one that caught my attention and I found interesting is the Mandatory Requirement #3: Competitive Procurement Threshold. According to this policy if the estimated value of the procurement of goods and services is 100,000 or more, then the organization must conduct an open competitive procurement process. This is an astute and highly intelligent policy as it promote fairness and healthy competition. This policy ensure equal opportunity for all the bidders to participate and get chance to secure a deal.

The Boarder Public Sector Procurement Directive has certain exemptions and exceptions. Such as, exceptions on the organizations that are not regarded as publicly funded under the BPS Accountability Act 2010 and Ontario Regulation 219/11 and exemptions under trade agreements.

This week lecture was highly engaging and I am looking forward to learn more about Public Sector.

It was one of the engaging and informative topic. I believe it will help me in the future too. I want to be an entrepreneur, own my small business. This module will assist me on decision-making, resource allocation, identify risk before and mitigate the risk. I believe, this topic will be a great lesson and help me in my future to run a successful business.

In this module we briefly went through Law of Agency. My understanding of law of agency is that: law of agency is the doctrine of the common law that deals with with the relationships between the three parties: Principal, Agent and the third party. Principal is the person or entity who authorizes the agent to act on their behalf. The agent is the entity that deals with the third party on behalf of Principal and the third party is a person or entity that interacts with the agent.

This relation between principal-agent is based on trust, respect where agent must act in the interest of principal. For instance, the principal makes the decisions and agent is responsible to share that decision to the third party on behalf of the principal. In case of legal obligations, the agent is not liable for any legal obligations or the liabilities arising from the result of the decision made.However, the principal must comply with the agreement made by agents with the third party.

Another major topic learned in this module is the contract law. Contract law is the body that governs the agreement between the parties. It highlights the rules and principles of the contract and ensure that parties abide by the laws. For a contact to be legally binding it must include 6 key requirements. They are purpose of the contract, considerations, must have offer and acceptance, must be for the legal purpose and and should abide by the laws.

The key procurement contract employed in Canadian procurement is Contract AB. Here, Contract A is the biding contract that highlights the rules for competitive process whereas, Contract B is the actual contract between agency and the successful bidder. Although contract AB is implemented by the most companies, contract AB has some of the demerits too. It limits creativity and innovation. That is reason why many companies have transition into more flexible and performance based procurement approaches that allows them to overcome market fluctuations.

This week, we completed individual case study on immediate issues and measures to prevent them. This case study was about an issue faced by a purchasing and supply department about a new software. Later, we were grouped in teams to work on the executive summary about the same case study.

It was another opportunity we got to work with group. All the members were collaborative and responsible.

We got some constructive feedbacks from professor and received decent grades on this.

This week is pretty hectic as most course had mid-terms. As we are on half way on the semester, there is a lots of group assignments yet to be done.

Overall, this module was one of the productive modules so far.

The government agencies mainly employs competitive bidding. It is the process public agencies invites multiple suppliers. After all the suppliers submit their bid, the agency compares the offers and chose the bid with the most value. Competitive biding encourages fairness and transparency as it offers open offers to multiple suppliers to bid. It is not necessary that the public agency will always choose the lowest bid, it also depends on the quality of the services and the value of the work.

The competitive bidding process is carried out in organized order. First of all, the local agency will define the scope and key objectives if the project, expected outcome and requirements of the projects which is then used in preparing bidding documents such as RFI, RFT, RFQ etc. Then, the agencies will invite the supplier to submit their bids through government websites and legal portals. Once the bidders submit their bids and the bidding period is over, the agencies will evaluate all the bid and finally select the best fit bid.

Having that said, some agencies also implement non-competitive bidding. This type of bidding occurs mainly in case of emergencies or when there is single source. Some of the processes are P-card purchases and unsolicited proposals.

Agencies prepares a detailed document on design, performance, quality and all other requirements and sent the document to suppliers which is also known as RFP. This is how company ask for specifications. Specifications are crucial as it provides clarity on the scope of work and quality of the products or services needed with comparisons with different suppliers. Some of the other important things to keep on mind while reviewing specifications are budget, cost and pricing.

It is necessary to have accurate documentations of the crucial specifications of the desired products/services to achieve the scope of work and the success of any projects.

This module, we learned something interesting about qualified suppliers and unqualified suppliers. Basically, qualified supplier is the one who meets all the requirements and specifications mentioned on the competitive bidding. In contrast, an unqualified supplier is the one who misinterpret their ability meet the requirement, if the suppliers are found to mislead the bid, they will be removed from the bidding process despite their lowest bid.Another interesting learning from this module is qualifying bids, which mean suppliers can also be disqualified for “qualifying their bid” which means they are not meeting exactly what is asked for in the document.

As each project has different scope of work, it is not necessary that cost is always the main priorities. Depending on the nature of work,agencies will have various evaluating criteria to select a suppliers. When evaluating competitive procurement it is effective to use a team 3-5 knowledge members. It is betteAnother crucial step in r to create a team of certain number and avoid making too big or short. Evaluation should always be done by the qualified teams to avoid future issues.Bids evaluation should be based solely on the information provided in the bids submission. Evaluating teams are not allowed to reach the company directly or use external research to select bids. This is particularly implemented to maintain transparency and fairness in the competition. There are some mandatory rules that are expected to be employed throughout the bidding selection process such as evaluation teams must not engage with proponents or other evaluating member. All the evaluators are required to complete a score card fairly prior to the meeting. Another crucial steps in bid evaluation is evaluation meeting. It is an hour long meeting among all team members regarding the bid evaluations, members have a chance to share their opinions of the submissions and clarifications.

These were some of the captivating insights on competitive bidding and evaluation process that I learned in this module.

In Canada, agencies must comply with the some of the ethics in procurement created by associations such as Ontario Broader Public Sector, Supply Chain Canada and Ontario Public BuyersAssociation.

The primary cause of unethical activities is conflict for interest. In my understanding, conflict of interest occurs when personal interest interferes with the duty of act. This can be due to favoritism, bias or unfair advantage for some bidder. Any agencies or bid evaluator should think smartly if their action may cause any conflicts or whether their actions can be presented as fraud activities.

Fraudulent activities are not new in public procurement. Many case scandals can be found online on misuse of public funds, patronage, corruption, bribery , bid-rigging and the list goes on. In this module we learned how some of the agencies were involved in these activities for their personal interests. When agencies involved in such activities, it risk losing public trust and support. If such activities are publicized, the agency faces financial charges. Most importantly, it will undermines the morale, cohesion and intergrity of the entire team.

Another crucial lesson I learned from this project was about team work. Working on this group brought mixed experiences. On the positive aspect, I gained substantial knowledge from some of my well-experienced and thoughtful team mates. Fortunately, one of our team member had hands-on experience on procurement which significantly streamlined our work and ensured that we fulfill the scope of our project. All the research done for this project and knowledge I received will forever be remembered.

In contrast, I also learned that sometimes we also need to work with the conflicting personalities. When one member of the team is not fully committed, it will impact the entire team. Unfortunately, one of the team member was really difficult to work with. The lesson that I learned from this experience is to never be like her.

Overall, it was fun to complete the project and present in front of the entire classroom. Our team did pretty well and I look forward to work with many teams in the future.

Team 1 kicked off the presentation and it was incredible. The way they compared all the alternatives providing real life examples was commendable.

Eventually, 2nd and 3rd team presented well too and next it was us. I was nervous at first but I overcome it thinking that I might have to do it everyday in the future.

Our team was pretty impressive and we did receive good grades.

Team 8 offered some of the interesting ideas. Their idea was based on cloud based system and related to AI use on procurement process. It was a captivating idea and totally agree that AI is most likely be a crucial part in procurement. I personally like this appraoch as AI would be a great tool to overcome market fluctuation. It is time efficient as it can run automating task by predicting trends.

Honestly, I was amazed by the creative alternatives our classmates presented. Hard work and dedication was evident from the presentation.

I enjoyed being there and listening and learning some of the mind blowing ideas presented. I have to say that I will miss this class.

Furthermore, we also learned about supplier management and various methods to measure suppliers performance.

In my understanding, supplier management ensures supplier deliver what they promised. It is done by collecting datas, setting crucial criteria/standards and comparing the suppliers performance against the standards. The set of standards can be quality, delivery reliability, cost, continuous improvement and communication.There are two types of techniques used to measure performance: informal and formal evaluation. In informal evaluation suppliers performance is evaluated based on internal customer feedback annual discussions while in formal process, various assessments are used based on the set standards.

As a result of the evaluation if the supplier receives unacceptable ranking, they are most likely to get remove from the contract.

Also, supplier debrief is another crucial learning in this module. It is a post-award meeting between suppliers and procurement representatives. In this meeting, they discuss the strengths and weakness of their submissions. It is the mandatory process where both parties must to participate whether the supplier gets selected or not. This meeting helps suppliers to improve their future bids. However, it suppliers are not allowed to question the selection process or the results neither they can negotiate.

All thanks to my lovely professors and friends who made my journey more fun and exciting. It was an absolute pleasure to meet them.

Farewell to the old, and here's to the new adventures ahead!!!