| RAO UES was the major state-owned electricity supply company in Russia. As part of the government’s strategy to develop competition in the power sector and ultimately to privatise, RAO UES introduced increasingly commercial approaches to its operations and retained WYG International to design a set of procedures and practices that would enable RAO UES to obtain best value when procuring fuel supplies for its power plants (in the past, fuel had been obtained under numerous contracting arrangements, some of which lacked competitive forces to ensure that RAO UES was obtaining best value for money).
The WYG International team of international experts drawn from Europe, North America and Australasia, brought the concepts of best international practice in procurement and focussed them on the specific business climate in which RAO UES was operating. The process of competitive tendering was discussed and debated extensively with RAO UES senior management and a set of basic principles were agreed. WYG International specialists drafted a comprehensive set of practical procedures to provide a basis for RAO UES staff to introduce international best practice into their day to day operations. The procedures were crystallised in a Fuel Procurement Manual approved by the Senior Vice President and issued as an integral part of RAO UES corporate policy.
In addition to achieving improvements in the cost effectiveness of fuel supplies, the introduction of competitive tendering with its transparent, even handed and equitable procedures, was an important step improving the business environment in which RAO UES’s many suppliers from across the Federation operated. The process encouraged suppliers to improve the efficiency of their own operations, to upgrade their forward planning of deliveries, to maximise quality rather than quantity and to improve their own business management practices. The project made a tangible contribution to the proper working of a competitive market economy and the existence of a well-designed fuel procurement process was seen as an important precursor to RAO UES’s privatisation.
|
