Erridge & Murray (1998) already highlighted that the perception of public purchasing as a clerical and order placing function can be considered the main barrier in order to improve and implement practices similar to those found in private companies. The main problems in public procurement are related to guarantee supplier’s selection through transparent processes instead on the grounds of political, favouritism or fraud. In this sense, some problems related to poorly managed purchasing process contributes to the non-delivery of value in public services. In general, the legislation regulating procurement imposes some restrictions on bidders (Gugler, Weichselbaumer, & Zulehner, 2015). It is important to emphasise that whether the quality of the good to be sold is not certain, price competition will provide the poorest types of goods. In the context of UK, Erridge & Murray (1998) already found that there was an increased interest of government on benefits of best procurement practices, similarly, with private sector practices. These practices can highly contribute with the creation of value in public service aligned with the concept of obtain “the best value for money”. In this context, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate how strategic public procurement can aggregate value to public services. In order to achieve this purpose it was conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) following the protocol from Pagani, Kovaleski and Resende (2015), called Methodi Ordinatio. This protocol was selected because it presents well defined steps and a rigorous procedure in order to select the papers for a SLR, which considers the year of publication of the paper, the number of citations obtained since its publication and the journal impact factor, in this case it was considered the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). These elements generates an index called InOrdinatio, which allows rank the papers by relevance. The intent of the research was analyse the papers related to public procurement and strategic procurement, published in last five years. Two databases were selected for this SLR: Science Direct and Web of Science. The key words used in the search for papers were: public procurement AND Strategic procurement and public purchasing AND strategic purchasing. Regarding the type of the documents, it was limited to “full articles”. In the primary search it was found in both databases 711 papers. After that, following the steps of Methodi Ordinatio protocol with the filtering process, we analyse 68 full papers, which presented an index InOrdinatio above 80. The results were categorized according to: university of origin; countries involved in researches; partnerships between universities and other organizations; methods; objectives; main results; main concepts approached and, suggestions for future researches. Therefore, this paper contributes to synthesize the knowledge on strategic public procurement and demonstrating how this concept can aggregate value to public services, considering the criteria expressed in the SLR protocol used. It innovates by presenting an SLR that follows a more rigorous protocol for the selection of articles. In addition, it was possible to establish a research agenda based on the results found.
Working with the private sector: externalisation, contracting, public-private partnerships
