The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) completed its latest e-auction for the procurement of public sector IT equipment last week, delivering savings of nearly £7m.

The 14 local councils and six NHS Trusts involved required £13.7m of IT hardware at pre-auction benchmarked prices, but at the end of the five-hour online auction, which saw suppliers bid for the contracts, they had secured the kit for £6.9m – an average saving of 50 percent across the six lots.

The OGC said that the latest auction took the number of public sector bodies that have participated in the scheme to 325, delivering savings of £21m since the first auction in 2005. It added that the scale of the latest savings demonstrated the success of both e-auctions and its strategy of encouraging greater collaboration between separate public sector IT departments through both shared service centres and shared procurement.

“The e-auction has delivered an extremely competitive deal, demonstrating the huge benefits that can be obtained by working collaboratively to engage with suppliers,” said Chris Chettle, OGC e-auction manager. “These councils and NHS trusts have together achieved far greater price reductions than anything they would have obtained by each negotiating with the suppliers on an individual basis.”

Posted: 05|14|07 at 4:39 pm. Filed under: UK News.