Government Operations committee  Well, let me finish. Here's the next part. What is not available in the current construct is the ability for a department to seek a departmental-oriented standing offer for a managed service. That would be a competition amongst the three primary standing offer holders, who would

Government Operations committee  That's correct.

Government Operations committee  That's correct, because it really is in the managed service space that the opportunities for optimization will occur. As opposed to ordering a one-off for the replacement of a printer, for instance, in a building, having a company or a company and their representatives contemplat

Government Operations committee  Thank you. The desire to go to three comes out of an extensive consultation with industry, a set of requests for information that provided written advice from various components of the industry to inform the strategy.

Government Operations committee  With respect to the potential for savings, it comes as a result of an evolution of the model itself. If you contemplate the current construct, there are nine active standing offer holders who operate with the support of a set of small and medium-sized enterprises to actually fulf

Government Operations committee  I will just continue to paint the picture. It's not a guarantee inasmuch as it is a competitive model, so if it is the top-ranked bidder who will provide the service, it's on the basis of a set of performance indicators, and it's a competitive environment—

Government Operations committee  All of these low-value transactions are actually disbursements by departments that don't show up in the SSC's expenditures and public accounts. If we go back to the 2014-15 main estimates, Shared Services' reference levels were increased by almost $96 million—and that was for th

Government Operations committee  Correct.

Government Operations committee  The concept would be that Shared Services would establish, in one instance, a standing offer, known price points, known articles, or known services from which departments could then avail themselves and contract for those various articles or services. In the case of standing offe

Government Operations committee  If it's a standing offer, you're simply calling up for goods and services. If it's a supply arrangement—perhaps there is a service supply, for example—the terms of the supply arrangement will dictate the maximum duration over which that could take place, and that may fluctuate.

Government Operations committee  Thank you for that question. We will reduce the workload in this sense. Departments currently package their transactions and send them to a single choke point, where they have to be entered into the system to be called up from a supply arrangement or a standing offer. That step

Government Operations committee  We are just beginning the analysis of the opportunities that will be available to us. The preliminary surveys identified that, by redirecting departments to existing standing offers, that alone would allow us to redeploy three full-time personnel to other procurement endeavours.

Government Operations committee  Sure. We operate with three methods of supply: contracts, including task authorizations; standing offers, which are situations in which a vendor will commit to a certain price point over a period of time for specified goods and services; or supply arrangements, which provide a br

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Chair. I read his comments, and my interpretation of his message was that Monsieur Breton was making reference to the situation before the shift in mandate. SSC had received a mandate to deliver IT, email, network, and data centre for the enterpri

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, typically in the basket of hardware we refer to desktop micro-computing, be it for mobile work stations, laptops, tablets, and the like, or peripherals—monitors, keyboards, external or internal storage devices, printing products, scanners. That's the kind of basket of