National Office for Local Content outlines institutional excellence indicators

Muscat: The National Office for Local Content held a meeting at the Secretariat General of the Tender Board on Monday to introduce indicators of local content within the context of the institutional excellence concept.

More than 300 participants representing 50 government departments took part in the meeting.

The meeting outlined three main objectives: to enhance the performance of local content application governance; to establish a comprehensive regulatory system to monitor adherence to local content policies; and to identify opportunities for improvement in a manner that contributes to the realisation of the strategic goals of “supporting the national economy” and “enhancing the role of small and medium enterprises (SMEs)”.

The organisers reviewed the local content achievements that have been made so far. Then, they identified the following:

• The mechanisms of applying indicators and methods and measuring their performance.
• The mechanism of applying local content standards to government projects, purchases and contracts.
• The mechanism of measuring local content performance according to specific indicators based on institutional excellence.

The meeting enabled the participants to learn about the stages of local content development—right from the stage of planning, through the stages of follow-up and to the stage of evaluation of performance.

The meeting also stressed the need to apply the “criteria of tender documents” to bids for projects/purchases/contracts, and to assess competitors according to the local content plans that they submit in their bid.

The participants in the meeting also learned about the local content indicators, which cover three main areas: the “development project”, the “operational contract” and the “government unit and its purchases”.

Each area includes three main elements: developing employment opportunities for citizens, enhancing the use of local goods and services, and supporting small enterprises and employers.

The abovementioned areas comprise 11 sub-indicators that seek to measure the performance of government units’ implementation of local content policies, as well as the extent to which they work towards the enhancement of local content in their purchases, contracts and projects—with the prime objective of maximizing the local return from government spending.