Thank you, Mr. Chair. On the questions around procurement shared services, this is really our first year up and running with procurement shared services fully implemented. It started April 1st of this fiscal year. To date, we have handled
approximately 1,250 procurement requests. These are everything from supply arrangements, standing offer agreements, procurement requests and we have awarded contracts of a total value of approximately $209 million to date. So we have been very busy this year. We also had to provide a lot of support to the forest fire season that added to the volume of transactions that we dealt with. So procurement shared services is fully operational now. It’s up and running. As the Minister said, we have staff in regional centres to provide support and to handle regional procurement initiatives.
With vendor engagements and specifications, there were questions around how we handle specifications through procurement shared services. We’re not responsible for developing the specifications through procurement shared services, but what we do is we work with the client department. No specifications are developed by the subject matter experts in the department. …(inaudible)…for example, are developed by the experts in the Department of Transportation. They developed the specifications and we work with them to incorporate them into the tender documents and we had the procurement process. Many of the specifications, we also helped departments with the
technical aspects, updating, modernizing them because many of them are dated.
In terms of educating our own GNWT staff, since we have been in place with procurement shared services we have had 70 employee information and training sessions where we trained 700 GNWT employees across government on procurement practices and procurement shared services. That’s how we are working towards improving our internal approach to procurement. On the vendor engagements side, we have held a number of sessions as well. So we’ve worked with the Chamber of Commerce in some regional locations to provide information sessions to businesses and contractors to improve the interest and engagement on government tenders.