Procurement Service Units (PSU) as Center of Excellence (COE)

Abstraksi

The paper highlights recent successes in Indonesia’s Government procurement system reform effort through the Procurement Modernization Project in piloting PSUs as COEs in various ministries, institutions, and particularly regional governments. The successful pilots become the operational solutions and models towards better end-to-end procurement process management leading to improved local government spending coordination from planning, budgeting and execution of procurement. Thus, improving governance and accelerating development effort. The first section of the paper explains how government procurement plays a strategic role in accelerating and evenly distributing development in the region, particularly in eastern Indonesia. However, the strategic procurement function in government is still marginalized and affects timeliness, cost and quality of government procurements and budget absorption. This leads to poor public service delivery, delays of development and contributing to disparity in the regions. The paper explains the success stories of the established and developed strategic and performance-based pilot PSUs COEs, especially at regional governments including in eastern Indonesia. After rigorous advocacy, training and mentoring efforts, the established pilot PSU COEs lead and managed entire end to end procurement process. In some of the local governments where the pilot PSU COEs are located, this has resulted in improvements in procurement and budget realization with local innovations in transparency of monitoring performance. It is hoped that this paper can help expanding the procurement modernization effort to further improve coordination of planning, budgeting and procurement execution towards acceleration of regional development.