Activities

The AUPN Structure

The Australian Universities Procurement Network consists of an Executive Committee of volunteers working under the Terms of Reference - a living document. The AUPN has 3 Standing Committees (Procurement Capabilities, Sustainable Procurement, Collaborative Agreements) and establishes working groups from time to time to address particular projects and issues. Currently there are 2 under the Collaborative Agreements SC for Visa Management and Airlines. Advisory Groups are regularly formed to advise the Executive, consisting of category specialists from within the AUPN universities and other bodies and consultancies.

The Way Forward

The AUPN Executive Committee members are volunteers who elected from participating universities and are dedicated to providing leadership to significantly improve procurement practices in Australian universities.

The Executive Committee annually reviews the rolling 3-year Business Plan through which the AUPN plans to drive greater improvements through sharing recognised good practices and building a body of knowledge in conjunction with other national bodies such as CIPSA, APCC, TEFMA and CAUDIT. Standing committees have been established to guide these new initiatives, making the AUPN the expert body driven by the sector for the sector.

The AUPN Executive is now pursuing an ambitious plan, leveraging in part from recommendations contained in the National Procurement Benchmarking Programme. To pursue this expanded agenda successfully, the AUPN is funded through a Subscription Model to provide financial support on an ongoing basis from collaborating universities who will drive the initiatives and directly benefit from the outcomes.

The AUPN Executive established three AUPN Standing Committees in 2009 to address important procurement issues at a national level. Each Standing Committee developed an activity schedule which identified the strategies and tasks they believe would bring the most value to the sector over a 3 year period. These schedules are living documents and will change over the course of time to reflect the priorities of the sector.

For further information on the Standing Committees, click here.

 The AUPN initiative has matured, providing a valuable conduit for national and regional networking amongst Australian universities' procurement managers. The Executive Committee sponsors meetings each year encouraging all procurement managers in Australian universities to attend.

 AUPN Surveys

The AUPN Executive and the Standing Committees occasionally send out surveys for the sector to complete. The questionnaires (when current) and Aggregated results are available to participating universities in the Information for Participants web page. 

The surveys are used predominantly to establish where the most value can be added to the sector, particularly for identifying interest and savings for potential Collaborative Agreements. The Executive strongly urges all participating universities to respond as completely as possible to gain the most benefit.

Confidentiality - how the data will be treated

Any named champions and other information collected will be held in strict confidence and used only for HES/AUPN internal purposes to further develop the AUPN Standing Committees' agenda; no information, names or contact details sought will be provided to third parties.

No individual university will be identified in the analysis of the data; the information will be made available to AUPN universities in a non-assignable aggregated analysis to provide participants with a comprehensive view of the current maturity level of procurement in the sector.

The AUPN Executive Committee will continue to seek additional funding from government and other suitable sources as opportunities arise, to benefit all Australian universities.