Vila Nova de Famalicão’s - Making Spend Matter Experience

With this process of unification of the purchase service, we get more knowledge of the type of city council suppliers. Even though we still have to know better our providers, which is the origin of involvement in this project, the sort of the products or which kind of activity sectors were more relevant to the city hall. Besides that, it’s very important to recognize the geographic closeness to do the deliveries more frequently and consequently reduce our stock.

At that moment, it comes up the opportunity to join the transfer network “Making Spend Matter” of the URBACT European Programme. As a result, this network could give us the possibility to perform a practice that was already tested and that could answer ours needs.

For this project it was decided in the meeting with the URBACT project team that we will invite some institutions to be a ULG, starting with a sample of institutions in which the city council have a more direct connection in order to easily do the expenditure analysis together. For instance:

• Schools
• Parish councils
• Social support institutions

Hence, these institutions, like the city hall, see this project as a possibility to analyze and improve the good and service acquisition process. 

The sample is one public school, one semi-public professional school, two parish councils and two social support institutions.

The next invitations for the URBACT Local Group (ULG) it will be more eight parish councils and one fire corporation were invited. The main idea is to involve these institutions and raise the number of identities to enforce the good practice and consequently get more expressive results to subsequent dissemination the project to all the municipality and to others municipalities.

Until the end of the project, we would like to realize that our expenditure analysis was a valuable input for all the organization of the municipality and make a change in the public procurement in order to be based on economic, social and environmental sustainable criteria.

The goal of the municipality is to improve the sustainability and transparency. As a result, implementing these criteria would be the next step to ensure our ambitions.

We believe that the political recognition of the expenditure analysis could be seen as an essential control tool and as an add value to the procurement.

At last, the recognition of the involved institutions will help a lot to spread the good practice to the other municipality institutions.