The Future of Public Procurement: Deploying the new Public Procurement Data Space (PPDS)

Blog

and Anastasios Papadopoulos

On 24 September 2024, the much-anticipated Public Procurement Data Space (PPDS) was officially launched, delivering on the Commission’s political commitment to develop a common European data space for public administrations in EU. Characterised as a high-priority domain in the European Strategy for Data, the EU public procurement governance framework is clearly advancing further into digitalisation, aiming to enhance transparency and reinforce accountability in public spending, as well as to effective policymaking.

In this blog post we summarise the benefits of the PPDS, the steps of its progressive deployment as well as some potential concerns accompanying its voluntary character with regard to public contracts that are not subject to the EU public procurement rules.

As part of EIPA’s series on ‘The Future of Public Procurement’, this blog post aims to make a brief analysis of the new PPDS, a powerful digital tool intended to unleash public procurement’s full potential.

Major benefits of PPDS

The PPDS will serve as a new, multipurpose digital tool supporting the European strategy for data by making national public procurement data easily accessible to all interested stakeholders – including public buyers, policymakers, businesses, taxpayers, and civil society – through the use of state-of-the-art and emerging analytics technologies. According to the Commission Communication on the PPDS, the advent of this data space

… will revolutionise the access to and use of public procurement data:

  • It will create a platform at EU level to access for the first time public procurement data scattered so far at EU, national and regional level.
  • It will considerably improve data quality, availability and completeness, through close cooperation between the Commission and Member States and the introduction of the new eForms, which will allow public buyers to provide information in a more structured way.
  • This wealth of data will be combined with an analytics toolset including advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), for example in the form of Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Intending to implement a digital transition to a fully integrated system for capturing and mining public procurement data at all levels – EU, national, regional, and local – the PPDS will establish a single platform to accumulate procurement data from across the EU. This includes data on public contracts exceeding the Public Procurement Directives threshold, which must be published via TED, as well as contracts below the threshold, whose publication depends on domestic laws of the Member States.

So far, national public procurement data has been fragmented for several reasons such as the format variations of the digital platforms used in each Member State, the domestic differentiations concerning the publication of procurement data, different administrative organisation of each Member State. According to the Commission Communication on the PPDS

(…) data from only 20% of all calls for tenders as submitted by public buyers is available and searchable for analysis in one place. The remaining 80%  are spread, in different formats, at national or regional/local level and difficult or impossible to re-use for policy, transparency, and better spending purposes. In other words, public procurement is rich in data, but poor in making it work for taxpayers, policy makers and public buyers.

Therefore, the key innovation of the PPDS lies in making data from all public procurement procedures – both those subject to and exempt from EU rules – accessible through a central, unified EU platform that will cover all levels of governance: EU, national, regional, and local. Capturing and structuring domestic data will lead to unlocking public procurement’s full potential to shape and implement strategic policies while ensuring transparency, accountability, and the effectiveness of public spending.

PPDS’s multi-staged deployment

As announced in the Commission Communication, the PPDS is to be achieved progressively as its deployment will involve several phases, fostering Member States’ voluntary participation. Briefly, the Commission will follow a multi-staged approach for interconnecting the national databases with the EU single data platform:

(a) It will set up the basic architecture of the PPDS and a minimum data analytics toolset.

(b) It will elaborate the data governance framework for the PPDS in cooperation with the Member States that are willing to join the PPDS.

(c) It will support the connection of the national publication portals to the PPDS.

(d) It will develop the data analytics toolset and integrate mechanisms such as AI and others to help identifying patterns and monitoring policies such as the Green Deal, and innovative or social procurement. Additionally, it will integrate historical data from TED and if possible, from national portals to be able to identify trends over the last decade and predict better future trends.

(e) It will further extend the scope of the data available for analysis within the PPDS, aiming to eventually cover the entire procurement cycle, from the pre-award to the post-award phase.

Potential challenges in realising the full potential of the PPDS

The planned interconnection between European databases, including TED data on public procurement and national procurement datasets, will be implemented on a voluntary basis. This approach may pose challenges to fully unlocking the PPDS’s potential, as varying levels of Member State participation could lead to some degree of data fragmentation.

According to the Commission Communication, each Member State is responsible for digitising its public procurement systems and linking its data sources to the PPDS (beyond what is already mandated for publication on TED under the Public Procurement Directives), while independently covering the associated costs. This division of responsibilities reflects the EU’s limited authority in interadministrative cooperation, raising the potential risk that not all PPDS participants will equally contribute data, leading to disparities in data availability between Member States [1]. Such uneven participation could limit the effectiveness of the PPDS unless Member States fully commit to implementing eForms – including for public contracts below the threshold of the Public Procurement Directive – and take a collaborative approach to building the platform.

Furthermore, since the PPDS will initially only include new data and gradually incorporate historical records, building a solid database will take time, especially if Member State participation is limited. The extraction and aggregation of large-scale procurement data from across the EU can only effectively inform strategic EU policymaking when the data is complete, comprehensive, and contributed by all Member States [2].

Conclusion

To conclude, public procurement data has remained underutilised due to issues related to data quality, lack of interoperability, and administrative fragmentation. As outlined in the EU Strategy for Data, the PPDS will unlock this potential by creating a single EU platform to accumulate data from both procurement procedures subject to and those exempt from EU rules. The PPDS’s significant benefits will surely reshape the public procurement landscape by greatly enhancing the accessibility, transparency, and accountability of public spending.

However, achieving a fully integrated space for public procurement data requires collaborative efforts at the EU, national, and regional/local public buyer levels across the Union. The functionality of the PPDS will largely depend on Member States taking an ambitious approach to implementing eForms, including the voluntary publication of data on public contracts below the Directive threshold – or potentially reforming their domestic laws to mandate the sharing of such data with the PPDS.

It will be crucial to monitor how effectively this ambitious digital tool is implemented and whether it delivers on its promise to fully unlock the value of EU public procurement data.

As part of EIPA’s commitment to supporting the effective use of digital tools in public procurement, we will soon be launching a seminar addressing digital solutions for enhancing transparency and combating corruption in public procurement. Further details on this initiative will be shared shortly.

 

Stay tuned for our upcoming public procurement courses

 

 

The views expressed in this blog are those of the authors and not necessarily those of EIPA.

 

Footnotes

  1. [1] Telles, P. (2024). Looking Into the Public Procurement Data Space and eForms. Public Procurement Law Review, 33(1), 14-27.
  2. [2] Sanchez-Graells, A. (2023). Digital procurement, PPDS and multi-speed datafication — some thoughts on the March 2023 PPDS Communication. How to Crack A Nut: A Blog on EU Economic Law.
Tags Public procurement