Buyers and suppliers

Definitions

In order to understand the modelling examples, it’s important to first clarify the definitions of some key concepts.

Buyer

OCDS defines the buyer as:

A buyer is an entity whose budget will be used to pay for goods, works or services related to a contract. This may be different from the procuring entity who may be specified in the tender data.

Note

Elsewhere in the OCDS schema the buyer is described as:

The entity managing the procurement. This may be different from the buyer who pays for, or uses, the items being procured.

There is a proposal to align this description with the above definition.

In OCDS, the buyer is modelled as relating to the contracting process as a whole and each contracting process has only a single buyer field, i.e. all awards and contracts resulting from the contracting process share the same buyer.

That said, many organizations can be assigned the 'buyer' role in the parties section, making it possible to represent contracting processes with a 'lead' buyer and other buyers.

Suppliers

OCDS defines a supplier as:

An entity awarded or contracted to provide goods, works or services.

Suppliers are modelled as relating to awards in OCDS and there can be multiple suppliers per award, i.e. all contracts relating to the same award share the same suppliers.

Consortia suppliers

When multiple suppliers put together a single bid, and are awarded as a group, this is known as a consortium.

In some countries, these suppliers only create a legal entity after the award, to sign the contract; or, they decide on a prime contractor, with the others being subcontractors.

In such cases, the Award object in OCDS can have multiple suppliers associated with it, one for each member of the consortium.

Example: Consortia suppliers

Siemens and Microsoft bid as a consortium for a contract to develop a new medical imaging device for the Department of Health and Social Care.

The contract is awarded to the consortium; however, the legal entity for the consortium is not created until after the contract award.

Both Siemens and Microsoft are listed as suppliers on the contract award in OCDS, with the respective legal entity identifiers for each organization:

awards/0/id	awards/0/title	awards/0/suppliers/0/name	awards/0/suppliers/0/identifier/scheme	awards/0/suppliers/0/identifier/id	awards/0/suppliers/1/name	awards/0/suppliers/1/identifier/scheme	awards/0/suppliers/1/identifier/id
DHSC-2019-A18074	Medical imaging device development	SIEMENS PUBLIC LIMITED COMPANY	GB-COH	727817	MICROSOFT LIMITED	GB-COH	1624297