From the Managing Director

The significance and effectiveness of public procurement is increasing

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, last year was truly exceptional for us at Hansel as well. We started the year by heading towards significant growth, as we can now serve the entire public administration of Finland. We reached several targets in joint procurement and even exceeded them partially, but the use of joint procurement in some areas, such as travel and restaurant services, decreased radically as the world repositioned itself. In addition to joint procurement, we offer tendering assistance for our customers’ own procurement and support for improving procurement activities. These services were in high demand throughout the entire year.

Luckily, we had been honing our practices for location-independent work for a long time already and moved to a multi-space office in the summer 2018. Now, this development work combined with our personnel’s excellent motivation helped us adapt to the new remote daily life unbelievably fast. Already in March, we noticed that every Hansel employee can work smoothly from home.

The expansion of our clientele shows in the significantly accelerated tendering pace and in our competent personnel preparing more and more procurements each year. They deserve full recognition for it! We would also like to thank our customers for participating in our joint procurement actively and giving feedback to improve it even further. We are honoured to be able to offer products and services that answer to your needs as well as possible. We promise to always do this reliably and on the basis of our best expertise.

The significance and effectiveness of public procurement has been acknowledged in a new way recently, for example, in the Government Programme. The first national procurement strategy for public procurement, drawn up in the Procurement Finland (Hankinta-Suomi) action plan led by our owners the Ministry of Finance and the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities, was published in September. It is great that public procurement is increasingly discussed, and that procurement units are developing their practices together. We have strongly participated in building cooperation and now, in implementing the procurement strategy. Even according to a conservative estimate, a tremendous EUR 35 billion is spent on public procurement each year.  It is thus important to consider seriously, what we want to and can achieve through them.

Following the national procurement strategy, the responsibility of procurement has been highlighted. For over ten years, we have worked hard for environmental, social and economic responsibility. We also promote innovative procurement. Last year, we used a responsibility analysis that is more extensive than previous analyses, and we gained very good experience from using it in tendering. We will tell you more about it in this annual report’s responsibility section.

This year is very special for us as 2021 marks the 80th anniversary of Hansel. Our strengths are living in the present and changing our operation in accordance with customer needs and the operating environment of public procurement. We will continue as before and make successful procurements together with our customers and partners also in 2021.

Anssi Pihkala
Managing Director