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Q: How can you best manage contracts in an environment where devaluation has occurred and foreign currency is in short supply? At the moment, this is causing big problems for my company in Zimbabwe. Some suppliers are asking for frequent price increases,
Scotland’s largest public sector procurement agency, the Authorities Buying Consortium, is to buy 112GW hours of renewable energy from ScottishPower. It claims that the two-year deal is the single biggest purchase of green energy in the UK.
German supplier Siemens is to supply 785 rail carriages for South West Trains in a massive £1 billion contract with Stagecoach. Siemens will build the units in Düsseldorf and Vienna. Most of the carriages will replace SWT’s “slam-door” units, while 200 of them will be used on new Waterloo-Windsor and Woking-Basingstoke services.
UK businesses will spend 74 per cent more on e-commerce this year than in 2000, according to a survey conducted for Computer Weekly magazine. It predicted that e-commerce spending is heading towards £4 billion or 6 per cent of total IT spend after more than doubling in 2000. The report predicts that businesses with fewer than 5,000 employees will double spending this year.
IT supplier groups in the US are up in arms over a proposed law that would annul their outsourcing contracts with government bodies if cost-savings targets are not met.
Sir Richard Branson’s People’s Lottery bid is facing problems with its technology partner, Automated Wagering International (AWI), as it tries to persuade the lottery regulator that it can take over from Camelot in October 2001. AWI faces similar legal and technical questions to Camelot’s partner, GTech, and has been criticised in the US over its failure to deliver software.
Max Landsberg
HarperCollins Business, £14.99
Rating: 5/5
Online purchasing at large organisations in the US is increasing, according to quarterly figures from the Institute for Supply Management and Forrester Research. In the fourth quarter of 2001, companies bought 9.5 per cent of indirect materials and 7.1 per cent of direct materials on the net.