DBM eyes procurement roadmap to achieve bureaucratic efficiency

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Budget and Management (DBM) is targeting to come up with a procurement roadmap next year in a bid to achieve bureaucratic efficiency and reduce corruption in the government.

Budget Secretary Amenah Pangandaman said the DBM is in the process of promoting green procurement policy through the amendment and revision of the existing procurement roadmap issued five years ago.

“We want to upscale and develop some of the provisions and push for it more aggressively,” Pangandaman said.

“We are holding consultations now with the Government Procurement Policy Board (GPPB) and the Procurement Service of DBM (PS-DBM) so by next year, we can launch it already,” she said.

The Green Public Procurement
Roadmap aims to integrate green choices in public procurement and put the government closer to its ultimate goal of ensuring sustainable management and use of natural resources by 2030.

“We will have a longer list of items, goods and services that we’re going to embed in green specifications,” the budget chief said.

Pangandaman noted that there has also been an increase in government agencies adopting green specifications in non-common use supply items from 26 percent in 2018 to 58 percent in 2020.

Further, the roadmap targets to transform the Philippine market by integrating green choices in public procurement and with the long-term perspective of achieving a sustainable public procurement initiative.

Apart from green procurement, the DBM is also expediting the digitalization of procurement processes.

The government has piloted the revised procurement reports and data sharing agreement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to boost its ability to fix bottlenecks and identify delays in procurement.

Pangandaman said the automated procurement reports is a source of “clear and real-time picture of an institution’s procurement performance by generating diagnostics that will help it adjust and set priority action plans for improvement.”