National and provincial government will, from April 2016, implement new infrastructure standards and regulations to better manage the country’s procurement and expenditure processes.

However, the public and private sectors were underestimating the structure of the State, with the national, provincial and municipal departments combined having over 1 000 different procurement entities, the National Treasury chief procurement officer Kenneth Brown said on Monday.

This, he said, necessitated government looking into and implementing supply chain management reforms.

“We need to find a way to completely separate our procurement process for infrastructure, as currently a lot of energy is spent on routine low-value goods services, which already occupies the State.

“Ninety-five per cent of time spent on procurement is spent on those goods,” he told delegates at the 2015 Consulting Engineers South Africa Infrastructure Indaba.

He maintained that, through the modernisation of its procurement policies, the capacity of the State could also be improved.

Meanwhile, Gauteng Provincial Treasury MEC Barbara Creecy told delegates that the Gauteng provincial government had learnt a number of lessons from two public procurement pilot projects held earlier this year, including the Cedar road tender and the National Treasury bank tender, which sought to open the bid adjudication sessions to the public.

The most important lesson, Creecy pointed out, was training. “We learnt that we needed to be a lot more careful in what we put out in the original tender specification, as this is where expenditure irregularities, identified by the Auditor-General, would later appear, as the original criteria for specifications was not used in the scoring process of the tenders.

She further said that local government “was not doing enough” to clarify the original bid documents, or to make them easier to understand and more transparent. “Training and development needs to be done with our supply chain management officials,” she pointed out.

Creecy added that local government realised the need for a properly set-up procurement hub, as many companies were unaware of the bidding process and often refrained from bidding. “It will be particularly beneficial for emergent enterprises,” she said.