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The following are typical social criteria in procurement:
* Reducing unemployment
* Preventing the use of child labour
* Preventing discrimination on the grounds of race, religion, disability, sex or sexual orientation
* Encouraging good employment practice
* Reducing local unemployment
* Reducing social exclusion
* Promoting training opportunities for the young or disadvantaged
* Encouraging access to work for people with disabilities
Reference:
LO 3, AC 3.2

ISO/IEC 27001 is widely known, providing requirements for an information security management system (ISMS), though there are more than a dozen standards in the ISO/IEC 27000 family. Using them enables organizations of any kind to manage the security of assets such as financial infor-mation, intellectual property, employee details or information entrusted by third parties.
LO 3, AC 3.1

RAQSCI stands for Regulatory, Availability, Quality, Service, Cost, Innovation.
LO 1, AC 1.1

In the scenario, ABC Ltd has the following characteristics:
– Large investment in facilities and machinery
– Access to skilled workforce
– Mass production.
This company is a manufacturer. Manufacturing is an industry that makes products from raw ma-terials by the use of manual labour or machinery and that is usually carried out systematically with a division of labour.
Manufacturing requires investment in machinery and access to a suitably skilled workforce as well as materials and components.
Reference:
– CIPS study guide page 74-76
– manufacturing | Definition, Types, & Facts | Britannica
LO 2, AC 2.1

Writing a high-quality specification is very crucial in every purchase. In through-life management, it is even more important since the assets often have very high value. Defining user requirement is the first step to write a specification. Without doing this right, many problems may arise in later stages.
Reference:
LO 3, AC 3.2

If an organisation doesn’t have capability to produce a technical specification, they can draft one based on standards or consulting the suppliers.
Reference:
LO 3, AC 3.1

Labour variance refers to a situation in which actual costs of labor differ from projected or budgeted labor costs. This concept is most commonly applied in manufacturing environments.
Labour variance either results from efficiency or rate discrepancies. Efficiency variance results when actual time worked is more or less than budgeted time for a project. Rate variance means you paid more per hour worked than expected. This may occur with overtime pay or when you have higher paid employees on a project than projected. Labour variance is fairly typical, but modest variance is usually not a big factor in manufacturing, because materials and other production costs are often much higher.
LO 1, AC 1.4

Value Engineering (VE) is concerned with new products. It is applied during product development. The focus is on reducing costs, improving function or both, by way of teamwork-based product evaluation and analysis. This takes place before any capital is invested in tooling, plant or equipment.
This is very significant, because according to many reports, up to 80% of a product’s costs (throughout the rest of its life-cycle), are locked in at the design development stage. This is under-standable when you consider the design of any product determines many factors, such as tooling, plant and equipment, labour and skills, training costs, materials, shipping, installation, maintenance, as well as decommissioning and recycle costs.
The Kano model is a theory for product development and customer satisfaction developed in the 1980s by Professor Noriaki Kano, which classifies customer preferences into five categories. Both Kano model and Value Engineering aims at optimising new product, so they can be combined to-gether. CIPS L4M2 study guide consider Kano model is a tool of Value Engineering

Example of Kano model (source: Wikipedia)
Reference:
LO 3, AC 3.4

3D-printed parts can replace traditional metal parts. They are also more easily customised to fit customer’s needs. This technology is an example of threat of substitute in Porter’s Five Forces model.
Substitute goods or services that can be used in place of a company’s products or services pose a threat. Companies that produce goods or services for which there are no close substitutes will have more power to increase prices and lock in favorable terms. When close substitutes are available, customers will have the option to forgo buying a company’s product, and a company’s power can be weakened.
Reference:
– CIPS study guide page 85-96
– Porter’s 5 Forces Definition: Analyzing Businesses (investopedia.com) LO 2, AC 2.2

Main risks involved in an under-specified requirement
* The product or service is not fit for use since it does not match the actual needs
* Higher cost due to corrections or reworks (proposal evaluations, scope or work monitoring, change in insulation materials or systems, reduced productivity, etc.).
* Higher operating cost on many fronts: process control, energy consumption, maintenance, etc.
* Other problems like corrosion under insulation, mold development, safety-related concerns, etc.
LO 3, AC 3.3

Specifications for through-life contracts must be clear. They should use precise technical language and avoid any ambiguity as much as possible. In most cases, ‘good quality’ is ambiguous. The con-tractor doesn’t know exactly which product the buying organisation needs and how to supply that product.
Other notices for description of requirement are:
– Short and simply description
– Clear definitions at the beginning of the documents
– Clarify abbreviations (if any), but abbreviations should be avoided as much as possible
– Avoid any ‘slang’
– Use imperative forms of language whenever possible.
LO 3, AC 3.2

Statement of Work (SoW) is the document that captures and defines all aspects of your project. You’ll note the activities, deliverables and the timetable for the project. It’s an extremely detailed document as it will lay the groundwork for the project plan.
Project Initial Document is an important document and should precede any specification writing project. It sets out the scope of the project and it is the team’s mandate from senior management Work instructions are also called work guides, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), job aids or user manuals, depending on the situation. In any case, the purpose of work instructions is to clearly explain how a particular work task is performed.
Framework agreements are arrangements between one or more buyers and one or more suppliers that provide the terms governing contracts to be established for a certain period of time, in particular with regard to price and, where necessary, the quantity envisaged.
Reference:
LO 3, AC 3.1

Regression refers to a quantitative measure of the relationship between one or more independent variables and a resulting dependent variable. Regression is of use to professionals in a wide range of fields from science and public service to financial analysis.
To perform a regression analysis, a statistician collects a set of data points, each including a com-plete set of dependent and independent variables. For example, the dependent variable could be a firm’s stock price and the independent variables could be the Standard and Poor’s 500 index and the national unemployment rate, assuming that the stock is not listed in the S&P 500. The sample set could be each of these three data sets for the past 20 years.
On a chart, these data points would appear as scatter plot, a set of points that may or may not appear to be organized along any line. If a linear pattern is apparent, it may be possible to sketch a line of best fit that minimizes the distance of those points from that line. If no organizing axis is visually apparent, regression analysis can generate a line based on the least squares method. This method builds the line which minimizes the squared distance of each point from the line of best fit.
Line of best fit is one of the most important outputs of regression analysis.
Reference:
– CIPS study guide page 99-100
– Line Of Best Fit (investopedia.com)
LO 2, AC 2.3

Value Analysis (VA) is concerned with existing products. It involves a current product being ana-lysed and evaluated by a team, to reduce costs, improve product function or both. Value Analysis exercises use a plan which step-by-step, methodically evaluates the product in a range of areas. These include costs, function, alternative components and design aspects such as ease of manufac-ture and assembly.
According to the Value Methodology standard, there are 6 phases to a Value Analysis:
– Information
– Function Analysis
– Creative
– Evaluation
– Development
– Presentation
1. Information
In this first phase, the team attempts to understand why the project exists and who or what it is to produce. They obtain project data, present the original design or product concepts, and understand the project scope. Schedule, costs, budget, risk, and other non-monetary issues are studied until the team is comfortable with the concept of the project, what it is to produce, and who its end users are.
This step also includes things like site visits and meetings with the project team, if required. Project documents like plans, drawings, specifications, and reports are obtained and the value engineering team becomes familiar with them.
2. Function Analysis
This step represents the meat and potatoes (core) of the value analysis. The team attempts to determine the functions the project serves. Functions come in two forms:
– Primary functions are those that represent the reason for the project’s existence, for example, a building project might have adequate plumbing as a primary function.
– Secondary functions are those that the project serves without being core to the project. For example, a building project might have as a secondary function maintaining the view of the neighboring building.
The functions are described in verb/noun pairs, such as “supply water to all suites,” or “Maintain view of adjacent park.” For a project like this, the team should come up with 10 – 15 functions. You might be surprised how many secondary functions exist for most projects. Subject matter experts would be a great resource, but in their absence an appropriate level of brainstorming and analysis are necessary.
The team should also identify value-mismatched functions to focus the improvements on. For ex-ample, maybe a large obstruction is preventing the view of the adjacent park from too many suites resulting in a potential mismatch of the cost vs. functional benefit. This is investigated in the next step.
3. Creative
This phase represents the generation of improvement ideas. The team develops alternative ways that the project can perform the functions that have been identified. At this step, the functions are looked at individually and each one gets a list of alternative ways to perform the function. There is no judging between the importance of the various functions.
4. Evaluation
At this stage, a priority is given to each project improvement idea. The ideas are discussed and potential costs are determined. Once the risk-reward profile of each idea is itemized, the team has determined which ideas are worth implementing into the project or feature.
A few years ago, there was a pedestrian bridge built near my home which was originally designed for emergency vehicles. Although this type of design is standard practice for the bridges of this type, the value engineering team identified that emergency vehicle passage was not needed (verb/noun pair = ‘maintain passage for emergency vehicles’). Also, a second major outcome of this value analysis was to change the design to an aesthetic, curved bridge because it was in a prominent location. The redesign of the bridge cost some money but this was more than made up by the cost of the bridge construction. Thus, the value analysis paid for itself about 10 times over in the reduced construction cost, and the bridge was significantly more aesthetic.
5. Development
Once the value improvement options have been whittled down to the ones that make sense, the value engineering team develop the options to the point of passing them back to the original project team. They must be clearly written and explained so that the project owner and stakeholders can understand how it benefits the project and act on it. Any potential negative factors are identified. Potential costs and cost savings are itemized.
6. Presentation
This last phase represents the presentation of the alternatives to the stakeholders. Often value engineering represents a change in the normal practices that people are used to, an “out of the box thinking.” Thus the best salesperson on the team is often the best one to do the presentation.
Some typical products of a value engineering analysis are a briefing document, risk analy-sis, present worth analysis, advantages vs. disadvantages, etc.
Reference:
LO 3, AC 3.4

From the scenario, you can see that the project team is developing a new product. They start with analysing the functions, and the costs of delivering those functions. This is a typical process of value engineering. You may read more on value engineering from the reference paper.
Reference:
– CIPS study guide page 171-173
– Value Analysis – Norwood Whittle (cimaglobal.com)
– A CASE STUDY ANALYSIS THROUGH THE IMPLEMENTATION OF VALUE ENGI-NEERING (researchgate.net) LO 3, AC 3.4

In this scenario, the final product has vast range of parts. The second problem is lacking any part can cause disruption to the production process. So GE has 2 things to do: to reduce the part varie-ties, and secure the supply. Part standardisation is the best option here. It can simplify the range of parts or materials used, and simultaneously, it expands the supply base of GE. If a supplier fails to deliver the part, the company always has other options to replace.
Costs are also a concern, but bottleneck in production imposes a serious risk to the organisation. Driving down costs using market competition cannot be a foremost priority.
Increasing production may help to reduce bottleneck. However, it will also increase the inventory of finished products and unnecessary upkeep costs.
LO 3, AC 3.4

According to Kraljic portfolio matrix, the low-value items with high supply risk are bottleneck items.

The purchasing strategy that is commonly recommended for these products is primarily based on acceptance of the dependence and reduction of the negative effects of the unfavourable position. An alternative strategy suggested by purchasing practitioners is to find other suppliers and move towards the non-critical quadrant.
– Accept dependence, reduce negative consequences: The main focus of this strategy is to assure supply, if necessary even at additional cost. Examples of this strategy are keeping extra stocks of the materials concerned or developing consigned stock agreements with suppliers. By performing a risk analysis firms can identify the most important bottleneck products and consider the implications. A possible action for dealing with unexpected bad dependence positions for certain products is to employ contingency planning.
– Reduce dependence and risk, find other solutions: This strategy is geared towards reducing the dependence on the supplier. The most common way to achieve this is to broaden the specifications of the product or to search for new suppliers.
The procurement team in the scenario has selected reducing dependency by finding alternatives. This is a right strategy for bottleneck item.
Reference:
– CIPS study guide page 82-84
– Purchasing strategies in the Kraljic matrix-A power and dependence perspective, Marjolein C.J. Caniels, Cees J. Gelderman LO 2, AC 2.1

As you can see from the scenario, ABC Group is developing the new product. It might be using value engineering. The latter sentences confirm this: the cross-functional team in ABC is mapping the functions and surveying the customers. Their method is known as Kano model.
Reference:
LO 3, AC 3.4