MEASURING PUBLIC VALUE IN MUNICIPAL PROCUREMENT : Challenges and opportunities of category management and the balanced scorecard

Sammanfattning

Public procurement is increasingly recognised for its strategic opportunities. This is re- flected in the growing implementation trend of category management across Swedish mu- nicipalities. Strategic efforts in public procurement translate into the creation of public value, which includes fostering cost efficiency, sustainability, innovation, market compe- tition, social values, quality of service and organisational learning. Performance measure- ment is well documented and understood in the private sector, yet still ambiguous in the context of municipal procurement. The purpose of the study is to explore how performance measurement can support the balancing of public value goals within category management in municipal procurement. This is explored through a qualitative multiple case study of five Swedish municipalities at the forefront of category management implementation. The empirical material consists of the perceptions of six procurement professionals captured through in-depth, semi- structured interviews, and complementary document analysis of a key performance indi- cators document designed for category management, developed by the Swedish national agency for public procurement. The data were analysed through the perspective of per- formance measurement, public value, governance, balanced scorecard, and category man- agement theory. The result of the study can be divided into five main findings. Firstly, balancing and op- erationalising public value goals is particularly challenging in municipal procurement be- cause responsibility for goal setting, performance and procurement execution is distrib- uted across political governance, procurement units and individual administrations. Sec- ondly, similarly to past studies, economic aspects related to public value dominate pro- curement decision-making and undermine other dimensions of public value. Thirdly, no clear prioritisation strategy exists for situations when strategic goals and administrative needs conflict with each other. Fourthly, current performance measurement practices are limited and almost exclusively measure economic dimensions. Further development of performance measurement practices requires improvements in data availability and qual- ity, and organisational structures that support evaluation. Fifthly, implementing category management can be both an additional challenge in the already complex environment, or a solution for clearer prioritisation where category-based scorecards could be applied across categories to support increased fulfilment of non-economic public values.