The Victorian government has launched a new online portal that will allow agencies and businesses to more efficiently deliver major projects across the state.
The online Victorian Major Projects Pipeline went live on Friday. It currently displays around 70 major projects — each worth at least $100 million — and details estimated procurement and delivery timeframes.
The pipeline is a planning tool where contractors and suppliers can view projects by estimated value, region, project type and relevant delivery agency.
The portal was developed by the Office of Projects Victoria. OPV CEO Dr Kevin Doherty told The Mandarin the key goal of the pipeline was to increase the efficiency by which the state government can deliver future projects by helping its suppliers.
“The pipeline itself is an online resource. The idea behind it was to provide information on the forward portfolio of Victorian government projects with enough detail so that the suppliers who want to participate in delivering that have enough info so they can plan their resources, they can plan what they need to buy, the training they need to, the staff they need to employ going forward,” he said.
“It’s about transparency, it’s about providing that level of granular detail to suppliers so they can plan the resources.”
While the initiative would provide transparency and certainty to suppliers who want to participate in the state’s market but may have not been able to previously, it would also help state government agencies to balance their resources.
“It also allows our own delivery agencies to look at what’s going on across all of the delivery agencies and it helps them plan their projects as well,” Doherty said.
“So they’ll be able to look at the pipeline and say, ‘for this quarter, there seems to be a lot of procurement going on or a lot of delivery of this type of project, which is going to stretch the market, so we’re going to manoeuvre our projects not to overlap that’. So there’ll be some efficiency from that perspective as well in terms of how Victorian government delivery agencies are going to plan the timing of their projects.”
The portal would be updated quarterly as new projects get approved and budgeted, Doherty said, noting that the website would also show the different stages of each project.
“So you’ll see the procurement phase of a project — that will be able to be planned a lot more efficiently — and you’ll have an understanding of where all the different procurements are happening within the pipeline at any point in time,” he said.
“So projects will still be approved, but the actual granularity of the timing of the different aspects of what’s happening will be able to be more efficiently planned by delivery agencies.”
The idea for the pipeline was pre-COVID, Doherty noted, and developing it has taken around six months due to a lengthy consultation process with key delivery agencies and the construction industry.
“To design what we wanted to provide, we did a lot of consultation both with the delivery agencies and the suppliers to work out what information they really needed and over what duration so that they could best plan their resourcing going forward,” he said.
“And then the next phase with the delivery agencies was making sure we had robust information from the delivery agencies to put into the pipeline.”
The pipeline complements public information available on Victoria’s Big Build website — another portal which provides specific updates on issues like the impacts of a particular project to travel journeys and public access, but is not targeted to suppliers.
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