Understand industry engagement
- Industry engagement is separate to the plan, source, manage procurement process, or you can include it as part of your planning stage.
- Industry engagement helps you to become an informed buyer, and can help align your procurement activities with current and emerging industry activities.
- There are different approaches to industry engagement, and your choice should be based on your circumstances.
- Every agency should consider making use of industry engagement, which can benefit buyers and suppliers.
Understand industry engagement
Industry engagement is at the core of how an agency becomes, and derives benefit from, being an informed buyer.
Industry engagement enables you to explore the capabilities of suppliers (and potential suppliers) to provide the goods and services you’re likely to need.
Industry engagement allows you to create, confirm or build on the government’s knowledge base about an industry.
Ideally, you should undertake industry engagement separately to an individual procurement. However, you can initiate engagement during the procurement process.
Industry engagement affects how you procure
Done right, industry engagement will influence the way you procure, particularly cutting-edge or new goods and services.
The way you manage your procurement and the resulting contracts (known as transaction management) should, in turn, influence your industry engagement strategy.
Industry engagement benefits you and your suppliers
Industry engagement helps align your procurement activities with current and emerging industry activities. It can also help you better manage your relationships with potential suppliers, which is a core part of the procurement cycle.
When done properly, industry engagement:
- gives you an informed understanding of the industries and suppliers with which you do business, including insights into their capabilities
- helps you understand how your needs are currently being met and what potential there is for better meeting them
- lets you explore new ways to meet your needs and reduce your procurement costs.
It also helps suppliers with their forward planning, as they'll better understand:
- your current and anticipated needs
- your interest in encouraging healthy competition, especially between smaller and larger businesses
- your commitment to exploring and encouraging innovation
- the volume of goods or services they may need to produce to meet your needs.
Industry engagement can also ensure non-incumbent suppliers receive all the information they need to prepare an informed tender. This helps create more competitive markets for the products or services you need to buy.
Keep industry engagement separate to procurement
You should keep industry engagement separate from your formal procurement processes. However, it should form part of the basis for your procurement planning.
Industry engagement is different from supplier management, as it involves exploring the capabilities of an entire industry, not just existing suppliers. While it’s likely you'll engage with current suppliers as part of industry engagement, you’re not bound to.
Industry engagement involves more than simply listening to potential suppliers pitching their current and planned offerings, although this may be part of the industry engagement process.
Industry engagement differs from market engagement because it focuses on making your agency an informed buyer. Market engagement involves making decisions about how to best procure goods and services.
Get the most from industry engagement
To get the best outcomes from industry engagement, always plan first. Poorly-planned or executed engagements can be a waste of time for you and your suppliers. They can even pose a reputational risk.
No single style of industry engagement works best every time.
You’re likely to get the best outcomes when your process:
- aims to foster innovation in the way goods and services are supplied
- is designed to build collaborative relationships between your agency and suppliers
- looks to develop healthy competition among suppliers
- follows the 8 principles for effective industry engagement.
Next steps: understand the principles for industry engagement
Now that you're familiar with the concept of industry engagement, you're ready to learn about the 8 principles for guiding effective industry engagement.