Stage Five: Review

“The REBus project has enabled us to encourage new approaches for circular products across some key procurement categories.”  Cuno van Geet. Senior Policy Adviser, Rijkswaterstaat
 

Aim By the end of this stage you will have: Understood the costs, benefits and risks of alternatives to linear procurement. Completed a full evaluation of the business model project. Understood the potential to roll-out, replicate and scale-up.

Replication involves increasing the impact of new approaches through repetition in similar procurement processes and broadening the take-up by applying the approach to new areas of procurement.

This is a critical stage in ensuring that, collectively, procurement projects and pilots contribute both to delivery of national policy goals and also enables the market and suppliers to develop and refine more resource efficient business models over time.

How to guide

Step One

Review performance
Review and analyse the performance of the approach using the criteria and process you have embedded within the pilot and/or contract. This should be based on policy, financial, functional and resource-based evaluation metrics and reviewed on a regular basis.

Consider if any of this information could inform your assessment of risks and future development on future procurement projects.

Step Two

Lessons learnt
As well as deepening the approach, consider if the lessons learnt through this process could be broadened to any other categories as in the case of the REBus pilot methodology for Rapid Circular Contracting. This was designed for construction but piloted in catering.

Step Three

Encourage greater adoption of circular procurement
Consider what steps are required to accelerate the take-up of circular procurement and over what timescales. Does the procurement strategy need updating and how will the wider benefits be captured?

The Dutch Government has a created a Category Manager role as part of its overall procurement strategy to oversee this. Category Managers are responsible for developing national category plans, e.g. for textiles, construction, ICT and furniture. The category plans act as strategic sectoral frameworks that cover all five stages of this REBus procurement guide.

 

Learning Public procurement has a significant role to play in encouraging suppliers to deliver more circular products and business models. A strategic approach to sustainable procurement is required in order to accelerate the scale-up of procurement pilots for resource efficient business models and realise the benefits of circular procurement. Developing sectoral category plans can be an effective approach to encourage markets and products to be more circular.

Case Study examples

All the REBus circular procurement examples are relevant to this stage, for example:

• Circular service for maintenance and management of ICT, Utrecht Province, the Netherlands
• Buying circular workwear with track and trace system, Alliander, the Netherlands

The case studies will be published on the REBus website as soon as they have been completed.