2024.06.04. The Fair Economy — The BPPA will focus support on the service industry by strategically leveraging public procurement.
The BPPA announced on the 4th that it unveiled its "Plan to Improve Public Procurement of Services" at a meeting of the "Service Industry Development Task Force," chaired by the vice minister of the Ministry of Economy and Finance.
According to the BPPA, public procurement has operated service-specialized systems and developed converged products in step with the government's innovation of the service industry aimed at securing new growth engines for the economy, and it will now push ahead with sector-specific improvement measures for sustainable development.
The core of this improvement plan is to expand and revitalize the public procurement service industry and build greater trust in it.
First, it will support economic growth engines by actively identifying new service products that reflect the trend toward servitization of industry and by expanding the participation of small and medium-sized service companies in the public procurement market.
To this end, it will focus on developing and supplying services that are tangible to citizens and closely tied to daily life, such as care service projects for the elderly and disabled, as well as converged services expected to see increased demand due to the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
For service industries recognized for their innovativeness, the scope of innovative procurement designation will be expanded to stimulate demand from the public sector
It will diversify service delivery and contracting methods, including catalog-based and subscription-based approaches, to broaden the range of choices for buyers.
Under the catalog method, a contract is signed based on a catalog presented by the company without fixing the unit price or specifications in advance; the price and specifications are then finalized through competition after the buyer requests proposals, before the service is delivered. Under the subscription method, buyers pay a set amount to periodically use the service they want.
By introducing a restricted-competition method for newly established architectural firms and simplifying evaluation criteria for small-scale service contracts, it will lower entry barriers to the public procurement market and give highly competitive, promising small and medium-sized companies the chance to fully showcase their capabilities.
To revitalize the service industry in the public sector, it will strengthen support at each stage of ordering and implementing service contracts, and improve platforms related to public procurement of services to encourage active participation by both companies and public institutions.
First, it will enhance expertise in ordering by providing advisory and consulting services starting from the pre-procurement-request stage, and by piloting a competitive dialogue method that seeks the best alternative through discussions with bidding companies in order to bring in private-sector technology and expertise. When requested by an ordering agency, it will also operate a task review committee to help normalize projects by coordinating conflicting interests.
The functions of service transaction and support platforms will also be continuously improved to build an environment where public services can be used more quickly and conveniently.
Key measures include improving the procurement registration process and expanding contracted products on the Digital Service Mall, enhancing the usability of the small-value transaction platform Ieum Market, and digitizing bid evaluations in construction engineering fields such as design and supervision.
It will build greater trust in public services by strengthening quality and safety management to spread services and by securing greater expertise and fairness in the review and evaluation of service bids.
To this end, it will strengthen the quality and safety of services by establishing performance and quality evaluation standards for each service sector, developing and refining service standards, expanding the number of items certified under the Service KS certification, and providing incentives to certified companies.
For large-scale, important projects, it will introduce a specialized evaluation system under which expert evaluators dedicated to a given field are solely responsible for evaluating it.
Alongside this, it will manage evaluation histories, monitor evaluators, and operate a reporting center for unfair practices to enhance the expertise and fairness of selecting winning bidders for service contracts, thereby securing trust in the review and evaluation process.
Lim Gi-geun, Commissioner of the BPPA, stressed, "For the service industry to grow and develop, it is important to identify new services in the public sector and establish a support system for public services through service-friendly institutional improvements and greater trust that match those services." He added, "This 'Plan to Improve Public Procurement of Services' reflects the current state of the service industry, including the convergence of products and services and of information and communication technology (ICT) and services, and we will do our best to ensure it is implemented swiftly and responsibly."
0 Comments
No comments yet.