In addition to the government role as a policy maker and regulator, the public sector also has an immense impact on the engineering and construction industry through its role as also a project owner. Government procurement accounts for a major share of total construction expenditures worldwide. Based on a BCG study, Boston Consulting Group, in U.K it accounts for around 31 percent, in Germany 44 percent and around 57 percent in the US. Governments need to actively manage and coordinate public sector demand and play a major role in driving this change in our industry. Let's go through a few examples here. The public sector wearing the hat of a project owner, needs to actively manage and stage Project Pipelines with reliable funding. If you think about it, when it comes to compiling the public sector, the Project Portfolio and Pipelines, there are many multiple objectives that need to be considered. Somehow they are conflicting to some extent to be able to develop a strategic procurement plan by the public sector. A clear guidance need to be provided to show the cost benefit analysis at each project level, and also it needs to reconcile that economic considerations as well as the social and environmental targets. This can be achieved by many ways such as, a clear organizational structures and operating models for planning and executions. Also drive high priority projects and last but not least, equip the public government teams with the appropriate skills and tools to function as an intelligent client. Moreover, the public sector needs to also ensure visibility of the portfolio to help providers respond to market opportunities and ensure a stable Project Pipelines over time. The United Kingdom launched several years ago an initiative that supported the management of the public sector Product Pipeline, for example, the project pipelines for 19 sectors are being published online and updated every six months. That will be creating a field for the providers of any size to participate. Another example I would like to show based on our work also, is the strict implementation of transparency and anti-corruption standards to ensure integrity in the public contracting and thereby promote efficiency and fairness toward bidders. Governments need to implement comprehensive anti-corruption and transparency frameworks. Such efforts should address all stakeholders along the value chain and should include measures to help with one create a corruption, resilient procurement environment. Also implement fair and transparent procurement procedures and last but not least, establish a clear practices regarding the prosecution of corruption. Let's take an example here, the C-0-S-T or the construction sector transparency or sometimes referred to as the Infrastructure Transparency Initiative, is the leading global initiative, improving transparency and accountability in public infrastructure. The C-O-S-T works with government, industry, and civil society to promote the disclosure, validation, and interpretation of data from infrastructure projects. This helps to inform and empower citizens and enables them to hold decision makers to account. Last example I would give under discussion would be the idea of considering the whole lifecycle oriented procurement. Now, as mentioned in the start of the course, traditionally, public procurement has largely relied on design, build, build delivery methods with a strong tendency towards the lowest bid. As mentioned before again, this mainly focus on the initial construction costs. Now, this not only neglect the total cost of ownership, but also limit the idea of innovation and productivity improvements. The traditional procurement and delivery method, as mentioned also before, is gradually being replaced with others such as Design-Build, DB, Integrated Project Delivery, IPV, and PPP, which will help introduce more flexible and outcome oriented bidding requirements. The new procurement models are being used in numerous major public projects around the world. Canada is one of the top countries globally that is a pioneer in the area in general of PPP. Now, to improve the bidding schemes in respect of innovation and construction performance, government should for sure review the asset, the processes specifications in light of newly available technology and materials as well as other procurement objectives such as total life cycle cost and sustainability. Let's take an example here, and we will wrap up with the session the Seattle's largest water treatment facility, which provides around 70 percent, seven zero, 70 percent of the city's drinking water, was procured on the basis of a Design-Build operate contract. That produced cost savings of around 30 percent relative to the city's initial estimate and enabled the state of the art water treatment technology that had previously been inaccessible to the public sector.
