About CYD

Cyd is the new centre of excellence where procurement and commercial communities can learn and support each other.

It is being developed to support commercial and procurement professionals to implement Welsh Procurement Policies in their day-to-day work.

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Background

In 2021 the Future Generations Commissioner and an expert panel supporting the Foundational Economy in Wales highlighted the need to explore a Procurement Centre of Excellence (PCoE) for Wales.

Discovery Phase

This led to a ‘Discovery’ (a scoping phase), which found that:

  • There was a need for a community led, but centrally supported PCoE, both digital and non-digital in nature;
  • The PCoE needs to be accessible to all stakeholders and enable capacity creation, rather than draining resources;
  • The development of PCoE should start small, with a minimum viable product; and
  • In order to get this right, the PCoE needs to be different from other services such as the former National Procurement Service (NPS).

Alpha phase

The next step following the discovery was to pilot the concept and recommendations through an Alpha phase. The key policy area for the Alpha phase is net zero and decarbonisation, supporting Wales’ net zero ambitions. The Alpha is also considering some of the wider context around the PCoE in terms of the Social Partnership and Public Procurement (Wales) Bill and the Procurement Bill.

The aims of the Alpha project are:

Share best practice

Design, build and test a service for sharing best practice on adoption of policy through procurement. A potential service would be the ability for buyers to understand which policies they should apply to each contract and good practice sharing around this.

Develop insight

Develop guidance, tools and case studies providing insight and policy enablement supported by briefings to the PCoE community on key matters.

Support training

Develop an accessible training catalogue (formal and informal), which could be used as a mechanism to widen the reach of capability development programmes in Wales.