Policymakers: Case 4. Identifying Market Failures in the Absence of Suppliers in Specific Markets

Before proceeding with the case study, let’s establish the key questions we aim to address:

• Can we use this module to identify markets where there are no suppliers?
• Can we identify markets dominated by non-resident suppliers?

The benefit of the public procurement module lies in its user-centric approach, offering thematic sheets equipped with a specialized list of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and charts. These are designed to anticipate and meet the varying needs of users. 

Nonetheless, some questions remain hard to answer with the existing thematic sheets. 

This case study’s practical utility lies in exploring the module’s capabilities to generate specialized reports.

The “Report Builder” feature allows users to create a custom report from a range of available dimensions and measures, populated with up-to-date data. 

This interface differs from other sheets by lacking interactive charts and visualizations. Instead, interactive elements are organized into two primary tables:

• The upper table lists available dimensions, or potential data cross-sections.
• The lower table lists all available measures, or types of data.

To construct a report, we recommend beginning with the dimensions to create the header for the table to be populated. Virtually all dimensions integrated into the model are accessible. For the implementation of our case study, let’s consider:

• For commodity market data, we’ll select the “UNSPSC (Unified Nomenclature System of Products, Works, and Services) > UNSPSC Title” dimension.
• For the number of suppliers, we’ll choose the measure “Count of Suppliers.” The potential absence of suppliers could be due to minimal demand, and for this, we can use proxy measures like “Total Planned Expenditure” and “Count of Solicitations.”
• To identify markets dominated by non-resident suppliers, we’ll add the measure “Count of Non-resident Suppliers” and the dimension “Supplier Geography.”

Clicking “Update Layout” will populate the report with current data. We have two data representation formats: tabular and pivot table. Reports can be customized by dragging and dropping dimensions and measures. We can sort the dataset by right-clicking and enabling sorting by the first column, considering that we are interested in the minimum value, activating the sort in ascending order.

We have observed a significant number of goods for which there were no suppliers. These goods could be of particular interest, such as:

• Helicopter Procurements – The planned budget is over 1 billion Tenge. Although there were two solicitations (Requests for Proposals or RFPs), there were no bidders, neither domestic nor foreign. This market can be characterized as having demand but lacking supply.
• Command and Staff Vehicles Procurement – Allocated with a budget of 117 million Tenge. The absence of suppliers might be explained by the fact that these planned sums have not translated into specific solicitations.
• Electrical Distribution Systems – Notably, there is only one supplier in this market, and it’s a non-resident supplier.

During the study of this case, we have explored how to work with the report builder to generate the reports you need. You can carry out further analysis based on the exported data. Thank you for your attention.