ChileCompra, the Public Procurement and Contracting Bureau, seeks to contribute towards a more friendly and flexible Chilean State, oriented to serving people, businesses and public institutions. It is a decentralized public agency, dependent upon the Ministry of Finance and under the direct supervision of the President of the Republic. Its main authority is Director Tomás Campero Fernández, who was appointed on August 29, 2003 along with the enactment of Law N° 19,886, which created the Public Procurement Bureau.
Reforms to Chile’s public procurement system, carried out by ChileCompra from 2003 on, have increased the standards of transparency and efficiency of almost all public tendering processes in Chile by introducing advanced contracting tools, rules, institutions and systems.
Ever since it was established, the Public Procurement Bureau has helped government agencies become more accessible, efficient and transparent in their relationships with all Chileans, thanks to the creation of a “window” between the State and its citizenry: the Public Market, which is operated through the www.chilecompra.cl platform.
The Public Procurement Bureau plans, develops and promotes initiatives designed to help the Public Market to grow harmonically. This is the place where public agencies’ demand for goods and services interacts with thousands of diverse suppliers interested in detecting business opportunities.
By 2007, 900 public agencies were trading almost USD 4.5 billion and conducting 1.5 million tendering processes over the internet each year, with greatly improved conditions of efficiency and transparency. Meanwhile, businesses have also improved their access to this market, and the number of suppliers doing business with the State has now tripled. Some 80,000 businesses place bids and are awarded contracts with the State each year. And with a 90% share of the business opportunities awarded, micro-, small- and medium-sized businesses are the ones that have gained the most from this new marketplace. Finally, the systems managed by ChileCompra produce a tremendous amount of savings in public expenditure: around USD 50 million each year.
In just a few years, the Public Procurement Bureau has become well-known for its excellence management and an ability to advance far beyond its own goals, which has led to wider access to the Public Market for the general citizenry. It has also been able to design and organize a highly complex system, in which an infinite number of interests, demands and needs of the many actors involved in the Public Market are all brought together with a set of rules that help improve competitiveness, increasing the quality and visibility of the available information and creating training programs for its users, among others.
With this high level of performance in the Public Market and the great success achieved during its brief existence, the Public Procurement Bureau is rapidly becoming an agency that is capable of using innovation to create new functions in the public procurement system, while also providing the State with additional services in the fields of management and technology.
Building on these characteristics, the Public Procurement Bureau is now making an effort to broaden the scope of the Public Market by networking with institutions dedicated to promoting and financing businesses, as well as with suppliers that are specialized within the industry. These relationships shall help promote increased social inclusion, develop new agreements, further empower its users, and create more processes of innovation and associability. |
