Monthly Archives: August 2012

Beware the one-time purchase of equipment spares Imagine that one year ago, your organisation purchased a major piece of capital equipment with a predicted life of seven years, assuming a 14 hour working day, six days a week, for 48 weeks of the year. The supplier, a Japanese company offered you ‘essential spares’, which were […]

Product Recalls- The choice of a lady? In the Brian Farrington Limited work with retailers, we are aware of the negative impact a product recall programme can have, as well as the associated cost. The trading Standards Institute publish on a regular basis product recalls. They relate to a wide variety. One of the latest […]

The Technical considerations of a purchase – raw cotton. Brian Farrington Ltd has assisted a client who had a dispute over the purchase of raw cotton. That specific dispute was in regard to invoiced weight. We should bear in mind that many ‘items’ are purchased by weight, including fruit, castings, steel and coal. Specialist technical  […]

Elite Athletes! What about the elite criminals in our midst! There are elite criminals in our midst. That is a fact, but are there any in procurement? There have been some well publicised cases, including the recent ‘potato’ scandal. It is a reasonable question to ask “How does an elite criminal operate in procurement?” Even […]

Today’s risk briefing is prompted by a report on a Performance Audit of San Bernadino International Airport Operations, Development and Construction Activities. The report is dated June 6, 2011. It highlights what can happen in the absence of robust due diligence and lack of robust financial controls. The report concludes that SBIAA has not established […]

The most extreme example of not knowing who is on a site occurred  at a client organisation. Two men arrived at a reception. They were dressed in white coats and told the receptionist they had come to take away the computers for repair. Unbelievably they were given unchallenged access! They took away the computers – […]

Risks inevitably arise when the responses to tender questions are not read carefully. Some ITT responses can be hundreds of pages.The evaluators will probably have lost the will to live long before the end. Superficially, avoiding detail is likely to come back to bite you. There are some gifted Tender writers who can give a […]