Jess Talks - April 2023

Welcome to the first edition of Local Buy News for 2023.

This monthly newsletter will be shared across our entire network of council stakeholders, partners, other organisational contacts, and suppliers, both current and future. The purpose of this is to create an open and transparent communication channel and provide opportunities for knowledge sharing and awareness of Local Buy, our offerings and what’s in the pipeline.

We plan on bringing you informative content to enhance procurement across the sector, events and activities, general updates on our arrangements and comprehensive knowledge sharing on our arrangements which will be further developed to support our suppliers in ‘doing business with council’. We will share product news from our partners and provide thought leadership and knowledge articles from subject matter experts across various industries that support local government.

We welcome any of your inputs and requests and would also like to share your stories to highlight procurement projects and journeys to create greater knowledge sharing across local government.

Recently, we ran a sector wide survey out to our local government contacts so we could take the opportunity to learn from our stakeholders about what you think Local Buy is doing well, what matters to you, and where we may need to consider improvements.

We received over 200 responses across all levels of council (officers, executive and elected members) and I would like to pass on my thanks to everyone who took the time to provide feedback. It’s extremely valuable to us.

The message was loud and clear.

Local Buy is an impressive procurement solution for Queensland councils and we have invested heavily to support local government now and into the future. This is through our technology platform and data analytics program, a fully funded procurement transformation project, spanning a 15 year, $30,000,000 commitment to building procurement capability across Queensland.

We have 52 Arrangements, that open every 12 weeks, which is no small feat and ultimately designed to support local and drive economic development throughout Queensland communities.

Pretty impressive, right?

What we haven’t got right, was evident throughout the responses.

The resounding themes reflected the need to improve our ‘Engagement’, ‘Communication’ and ‘Education’.

My challenge is to tackle these areas to meet your needs, creating broader value across Queensland and ensuring that we communicate regularly and transparently with our stakeholders. This ties back to our ‘core values’ as an organisation.

The feedback from the surveys, and through other channels will inform how we develop our Engagement Strategy. We will be getting boots on the ground, in your communities, engaging with you on what matters, including how to best use our Arrangements and extract value. We are also developing a Supplier Engagement Program, to support and provide improved value to our suppliers through holding local economic development forums, education and awareness on the mechanics of doing business with local government and other initiatives to support our approved suppliers.  

We have some work to do. We understood this needed to happen, which was part of why we took the opportunity to restructure and invest further in the Local Buy leadership following the resignation of our previous CEO. For those that are not aware, Brent Reeman has assumed some of the day-to-day CEO responsibilities for Local Buy.

As the Executive Director, Engagement and Strategic Partnerships, my role is to support the sector through our engagement and communications activities as well as build and deliver on the long term strategy for Local Buy.

Mike Waterland has been appointed as the Executive Director Operations, to oversee and manage the Local Buy Arrangements, including the governance and compliance requirements of Local Buy.

On behalf of the team, we look forward to this next stage of Local Buy, working with the sector, our suppliers and other organisations to deliver even greater procurement value and capability.

Enjoy the read and thank you for your support. 

Reach out to me at any time via email or call me on 0455 081 848

Jess