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花费很好地欢迎这篇文章Peter Smith，采购专家和作者。
The UK government has taken a lot of flack over the past year in terms of its Covid pandemic-related procurement. Issues have included buying PPE (personal protective equipment) from some verystrange suppliers; failing to create new sources of supply for ventilators;giving contracts to “friends” without a competitive process, and most recently, not keeping track of exactly所有PPE必须的地方。
However, in one spend area, the UK appears to have outperformed most countries, including member states of the European Union. That is in the acquisition of Covid vaccines, perhaps the most important procurement of all in this past year.
从本月早些时候的数据显示,15% of the UK population had been vaccinated at a time when the figure stood at 3.6% for Spain, 3.1% for Germany and just 2.4% for France. So what did the UK get right, and what can we learn that might be applicable in other procurement situations? It looks like the UK really understood the nature ofvalue以及如何与此特定采购相关。这是所有采购的重要点，但经常忘记的一个重要点。这里，疫苗的价值是巨大的，并且非常有关的时间。
In terms of lives saved, given the rate of deaths in the UK prior to the vaccine being available, it is arguable that one week of earlier vaccine availability saved maybe 7,000 lives. In other words, if the UK had started vaccination at the beginning of February, rather than the beginning of January, we would have seen some 30,000 more deaths.
That has a huge value of course, but the financial side of the equation is perhaps even more startling. Estimates suggest that Covid has cost the British government around £360 billion in direct costs and lost tax revenues. That staggering amount would have paid for two entire Apollo space programs — at current prices! It also equates to about £6 billion PER WEEK. So again, getting the vaccine one month earlier would bring a benefit of over £25 billion to the country.
Now it seems that the UK politicians and officials understood the incredible value of speed in this procurement, and maybe the EU didn’t. So the UK took some risks. It threw money at early-stage partnerships with a range of possible vaccine suppliers — even including a French firm, Valneva. Their vaccine was first developed near Nantes, but Britain “rolled out the red carpet for the firm,” as a French politician said, and a UK factory will be the first on-stream for vaccine distribution.
英国还将牛津大学推动与阿斯利伦卡的伙伴关系，而不是默克，因为它给了英国更好的供应安全，采购和供应链专业人员应该始终考虑的另一个因素。（英国卫生部长坚持为此，因为他看过这部电影“Contagion”显然！）
除了提前公开资助的投资并与潜在的提供商进行合作方式，英国在谈判中表现出比欧盟更具灵活性。它在药物公司的合同中接受了比通常预期的合同的责任。这种灵活的方法再次导致合同完成更快，最终提前提供产品。
Some of the success was down to luck, to be fair. The UK hedged its bets quite widely in terms of choosing potential suppliers, another good strategic move, but was lucky in that pretty much all the firms chosen were successful. Meanwhile, the EU made some unlucky choices — the Sanofi vaccine development wasn’t successful, for instance.
But the politics of the EU also intervened, and the need to involve all the countries slowed down negotiations. The EU perhaps pushed harder on price than the UK, but remember that £6 billion represents just a week of benefit. The UK bought 267 million doses at a cost of £2.9 billion — even if that was a little more than it might have been, the speed advantage more than compensated.
那么这一切都告诉我们了什么？主要是，我们必须始终在价值方面看看更大的画面。那些在采购中工作的人知道你经常让利益相关者声称“我们现在必须拥有它！”这通常是没有遵循适当的采购过程的借口，但有时，速度真的比最后一点谈判更重要。有时放弃IP的责任或某些条款是值得的优先客户。
To summarize, the UK vaccine success shows us that:
- 与供应商的协作，伙伴关系方法通常会带来卓越的结果。
- 在关键的支出领域，寻找多个供应商来传播风险并对冲您的赌注。供应链风险和弹性在危机时期出现。
- Sometimes speed is more important than pretty much anything else.
- 在买方面的合作可能会给你更多“购买力量”，但它可能是笨拙和减慢过程。
- Be flexible when you’re negotiating, particularly when you’re looking at strategic, critical and high-risk spend items or categories.
- Price is important of course — but always put it in the context of wider value.
最后，在过去一年左右的英国政府中，疫苗的良好工作并没有原谅我们在英国政府中看到的其他一些“不良购买”。每一个采购都是不同的，需要根据自己的优点来接近。但我们可以说疫苗采购一直是值得注意的成功之一，而作为今天（星期二，2月23日星期二）的人，我个人非常感谢所有参与者！
(There is more on this topic — and others — on Peter’s latestBad Buying podcast here).
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of Spend Matters.
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