PURCO SA Five Core Focus Areas
OUR MANDATE
PURCO SA is mandated to create collaborative value for our Member Institutions in the areas of procurement, consultancy services, and academic information. Our mandate includes advancing the wellbeing of Higher Education students as well as the broader national objectives of economic growth, job creation and industry transformation.
The key goal for Higher Education institutions is to prepare young people for the future, which means that the application of available funds needs to be focused on student outcomes, research, and our academic faculty, with particular care to minimize administration costs while improving efficiencies.
PURCO SA helps to achieve these objectives through our 5-pronged collaborative value offering.
1. Tender Management and support
• National tenders - We identify common product and service requirements across Member Institutions and conduct collaborative national tenders.
• Individual tenders - We assist individual Members to manage professional tenders that are efficient, procedurally compliant and fully auditable.
• Online management - We offer virtual management of all tenders from their initiation with bid committees through to online bid submissions and evaluation.
2. Contract negotiation and administration
• National tenders and framework agreements - We negotiate collaborative National Contracts as well as Individual Contracts for specific institutions. Wherever possible individual contracts are designed on a Transversal basis so they can easily be customized for use by all Members. We manage more than 804 individual contract agreements with 598 contracted suppliers across South Africa and Namibia.
3. Consultancy services
Our Management Consultancy Division delivers expert consulting and project management services across all disciplines. The foundational principles of the division are to provide a shared resource to Members that enjoys deep Higher Education expertise; offer long-term sustainability; and make our services available to Members at accessible rates that are lower than commercial costs. The Division also offers its services commercially to organizations outside Higher Education
4. PURQ Academic information platform
PURQ is a secure, online platform that provides a centralized source of academic qualification and enrolments history, and an electronic transcripts exchange. PURQ empowers students to access their records without the need to engage physically with their University, and leverage their qualifications for recruitment and financial benefit. PURQ already hosts 75% of South African academic records. There is no cost for institutions to subscribe to the collaborative platform.
5. Member and Supplier development
One of our strategic goals is to focus on Member and Supplier skills and development. We offer: Member training courses; Supplier development initiatives; Fortnightly online Ponder events; PURCO SA Annual Conference; Member attendance at international conferences; Annual Source Guide and Contract Director; Social media platforms; PURCO SA Internships
PURCO SA offers strategic inputs and practical services that address many of the operational needs of the sector, providing crucial support to help Higher Education redesign itself for the future.