The platform · Procurement Act 2023
eSourcing OS
eSourcing OS is a source-to-contract procurement platform for UK contracting authorities, built for the Procurement Act 2023. It carries a procurement the whole way: the pipeline and preliminary market engagement before anything is advertised, then the ITT, clarifications, submissions and evaluation while it runs, then award, the contract itself and how the supplier performs against it.
The Find a Tender notices are produced by the stage that generates them, across fifteen notice types, submitted directly through our own approved buyer API key. It sits on G-Cloud 15 (RM1557.15), so a contracting authority can appoint us without running a tender first.
Definitions
Source-to-contract, and where it ends
Source-to-contract, usually shortened to S2C, is the part of the procurement cycle that runs from identifying a requirement to holding a signed contract and managing it. It covers market engagement, tendering, clarifications, evaluation, award and contract management. eSourcing OS is a source-to-contract platform, and it covers all of that.
Procure-to-pay, or P2P, is the downstream half: raising a requisition and a purchase order against a contract, receiving the goods or certifying the milestone, matching the supplier invoice, approving it and paying. The two are often sold together as source-to-pay, and they are genuinely different systems doing different jobs, usually owned by different teams. Procurement owns the first. Finance owns the second.
We are explicit about the line because plenty of platforms are not, and a buyer who assumes they are getting invoice matching finds out during implementation. eSourcing OS does not raise purchase orders, match invoices or execute payments. What it does do at that end is record payments made against a contract and report payment performance, which the Act requires and which is a different obligation. There is more on that below, and on where procure-to-pay sits on the roadmap.
One procurement, end to end
Every stage, and the notices that belong to it
Most teams tell us the notices are the part they dread, and the reason is almost always the same: they are assembled afterwards, from records kept somewhere else, by someone reconstructing what happened from a shared drive and a memory. In eSourcing OS each notice is produced by the stage of the procurement that triggers it, using data the system already holds because it ran that stage.
Pipeline and forward plan
What is coming, when, under which route to market and at what estimated value. A forward plan that exists before anything is advertised is the difference between a procurement function that is planned and one that is reactive, and it is what makes the pipeline notice possible rather than retrospective.
Preliminary market engagement
Engage the market before you write the specification. Publish an engagement, invite suppliers, run questions and collect responses as evidence rather than as a folder of emails. Under the Procurement Act, engagement that shapes a procurement has to be recorded and, where it confers advantage, disclosed. Doing it in the system means the record exists without anyone having to assemble it later.
Tender: ITT, RFQ and the competitive flexible procedure
Build the tender, its lots, its documents and its questions. The Act introduced the competitive flexible procedure, which lets a buyer design a multi-stage process rather than choose from a fixed menu, and that flexibility is only usable if the system can express it: stages, gates, refinement rounds and different question sets at each.
Clarifications and supplier Q&A
Questions come in, answers go out to everyone, and the thread is visible to every bidder on the same terms. Equal treatment is not a policy you can apply by being careful with an inbox. Threaded clarifications with attachments and a published answer log are how it is demonstrated afterwards.
Submissions
Suppliers respond through a portal: structured responses, pricing, documents and annexes, with consortium and joint bidding where suppliers bid together. Submissions lock at deadline. Nothing arrives by email, so nothing is received late and accepted by accident.
Evaluation and moderation
Panels, criteria, weightings, individual scores, comments, moderation and a final decision. The scores are attributable, the moderation is recorded, and the reasoning behind an award can be reconstructed months later. This is the part that has to survive a challenge, and the reason it survives is the record, not the recollection.
Award, standstill and transparency
Award decisions, assessment summaries to unsuccessful bidders, the standstill period, and the contract award and contract details notices that follow. Produced from the procurement that generated them rather than retyped into a portal from a spreadsheet afterwards.
Contract management
The award becomes a contract automatically, with start and end dates, value, committed and remaining value, milestones and deliverables, KPIs and supplier performance reviews, modifications with their value and time impact, risks, and renewal alerts before the date rather than after it.
Social value, tracked to delivery
Measures defined at tender, commitments made in the bid, winning commitments carried into the contract as records, delivery reported by the supplier and validated by the buyer. Committed against delivered, visible as a number rather than an assertion in a report at year end.
Payment performance and UK17
Payments recorded against a contract, with days-to-pay computed and banded into 30 days, 31 to 60, and over 60, and a compliance summary for the UK17 payments compliance notice. This is payment reporting, which is a statutory obligation under the Act, and it is not the same thing as paying suppliers.
Notices
We publish to Find a Tender directly
eSourcing Data holds an approved Find a Tender buyer API key, and eSourcing OS builds and submits notices through it rather than exporting a file for someone to key in elsewhere. Fifteen UK notice types are supported, covering planning and pipeline, preliminary market engagement, tender and transparency, award and contract details, dynamic market establishment and modification, contract change, and the UK17 payments compliance notice.
The workflow matters as much as the connection. A user should not have to know which notice a given action triggers, or what the payload looks like. The system knows that a dynamic market being established requires a particular notice, generates the data from the market it already holds, routes it for review by a human before it goes anywhere, submits it, and stores the publication reference against the record. Test and live submission are gated separately, so a rehearsal cannot become a publication by accident.
This is the single biggest practical difference between running a procurement in eSourcing OS and running it in a system that stops at the tender. Compliance stops being a task that happens after the work and becomes a by-product of doing the work.
Frameworks and markets
The part it is strongest at
A commercial vehicle is not a tender with extra steps. It has members, conditions, admissions, competitions inside it and a life of its own, and a system that treats it as a folder of documents will not run one for long.
Frameworks and their supplier lists
Establish a framework, admit suppliers to it, and run call-off competitions inside it with the right suppliers invited.
Dynamic markets and DPS
Applications assessed continuously rather than at a closing date, membership decisions with reasons, and the establishment and modification notices that go with them.
Call-offs
Competitions inside a vehicle, linked to the parent framework or market, so a call-off knows what it was called off from.
Supplier qualification
Conditions of participation, evidence, assessment and admission, with the decision and its reasons recorded against the supplier.
eSourcing Data also designs, establishes and operates these vehicles as a service, either as the operator or under a buyer’s own name. How that works →
Adopting it
What it takes to start
The honest answer to “how long is implementation” is that it depends on how much you try to do at once, and the organisations that get value quickly are the ones that do not try to do all of it. A single category, or a single framework, is a better first move than a migration.
Reporting
What your board actually asks for
How much did we spend, with whom, through which route, and what did we commit to. Those questions are answerable by query rather than by somebody rebuilding a spreadsheet each quarter, because the procurement, the award, the contract and the social value commitment are the same connected record rather than four systems that agree approximately.
The same connection is what makes an award defensible. Evaluation carries the scores, the evaluator, the moderation and the final decision, so the reasoning behind a decision can be reconstructed eighteen months later rather than remembered.
Assurance
What your IT department asks for
Single sign-on, multi-factor authentication and role-based access. Immutable audit logging with the actor, the action and the timestamp on every change. UK data residency, retention and deletion, and the documentation a data protection impact assessment needs.
We would rather meet your assurance team early than discover a blocker late. Security and accreditations →
Roadmap, not capability
Where procure-to-pay actually is
eSourcing OS does not do procure-to-pay today. There is no requisition, no purchase order, no goods receipt, no invoice matching and no payment execution in the platform as it stands. We say so plainly because the alternative is a buyer discovering it during implementation, and because a claim that fails a demo costs every other claim alongside it.
What exists at that end of the process is payment recording and payment compliance reporting: payments logged against a contract, days-to-pay calculated, and performance banded into 30 days, 31 to 60 days and over 60 for the UK17 payments compliance notice. That is a statutory reporting obligation under the Procurement Act, it is genuinely useful, and it is not procure-to-pay.
The build sequence is deliberate. Purchase-to-pay is only worth having on top of a reliable commercial record: an approved payable means nothing unless the contract, the award and the delivery behind it are trustworthy. Requisitions, purchase orders, receipting, invoice capture and matching are scheduled through 2027, followed by payment orchestration against buyer finance systems. When those exist, they will appear in the list above rather than in this section.
Why it works like this
Built by people who run procurements
eSourcing Data is not only a software company. We run procurement exercises end to end as an outsourced team for buyers who have the requirement but not the capacity, and we design, establish and operate frameworks and dynamic markets for our own clients on this platform.
That is why the awkward parts are built. The clarification that arrives at 16:55 on the deadline. The moderation session where two evaluators disagree and the record has to show how it resolved. The modification eighteen months into a contract that changes the value and has to be noticed. The framework that needs a supplier admitted between competitions. None of those are features anyone requests in a demo, and all of them are the difference between a system that survives contact with a live procurement and one that does not.
It is also why we will tell you when the answer is no. A platform sold by people who have never had to defend an award has no particular reason to be careful about what it claims.
Who runs it
Who eSourcing OS is built for
Contracting authorities operating under the Procurement Act 2023: councils and combined authorities, NHS bodies and integrated care boards, housing associations and ALMOs, universities and further education colleges, blue light services, utilities, and central government bodies and their arms-length organisations.
Also the organisations that run procurement on somebody else’s behalf: outsourced procurement providers, consultancies managing sourcing across several client accounts, and shared services covering multiple bodies. Multi-organisation working is a first-class part of the platform rather than a workaround, because that is how a large share of UK public procurement is actually delivered.
Size matters less than shape. An organisation running four procurements a year has the same Procurement Act obligations as one running four hundred, and proportionally less capacity to meet them, which is why the overhead of compliance frequently lands harder on the smaller team.
How you buy it
G-Cloud 15, no tender needed
eSourcing Data is on RM1557.15, the G-Cloud 15 framework, and a contracting authority can appoint us directly from it. Procuring the procurement platform is not itself a procurement, which removes the most common reason a buyer postpones the decision by a year.
Alongside what you have
It does not need to replace your ERP
eSourcing OS covers source-to-contract. It does not need to displace a finance system, an enterprise resource planning platform or an existing contract register to be worth having, and replacing an incumbent stack is not a precondition of adopting it. Buyers commonly start with one category or one framework.
Questions
About eSourcing OS
What is eSourcing OS?
eSourcing OS is a source-to-contract procurement platform for UK contracting authorities, built by eSourcing Data and compliant with the Procurement Act 2023. It covers the whole lifecycle of a procurement: pipeline and preliminary market engagement before anything is advertised, then the ITT or RFQ, clarifications and evaluation while it runs, then award, the contract itself, supplier performance against it, and the Find a Tender notices that each of those stages triggers.
What does source-to-contract mean?
Source-to-contract, often shortened to S2C, is the part of the procurement cycle that runs from identifying a requirement to having a signed contract and managing it. It covers market engagement, tendering, clarifications, evaluation, award and contract management. It is distinct from procure-to-pay, or P2P, which is the downstream part: raising a purchase order against that contract, receiving goods, matching an invoice and paying it.
Does eSourcing OS do procure-to-pay?
Not today. eSourcing OS is a source-to-contract platform. It records payments made against a contract and reports payment performance for the UK17 payments compliance notice, but it does not raise purchase orders, match invoices or execute payments. Procure-to-pay is on the roadmap for 2027 and is described as roadmap rather than as a current capability.
Can eSourcing OS publish Find a Tender notices?
Yes, directly. eSourcing Data holds an approved Find a Tender buyer API key, and the platform builds and submits notices for 15 UK notice types including UK1, UK3, UK5 through UK17. Notices are produced by the stage of the procurement that generates them, with a controlled review before submission and the publication reference stored against the record.
Which Procurement Act notices does it produce?
Fifteen notice types are supported: the pipeline and planned procurement notices, preliminary market engagement, tender and transparency notices, contract award and contract details notices, dynamic market establishment and modification notices, contract change notices and the UK17 payments compliance notice.
Does it handle frameworks, call-offs and dynamic markets?
Yes, and it is the part the platform is strongest at. Frameworks and their supplier lists, call-off competitions inside a framework or dynamic market, supplier admission and qualification, and the notices each of those triggers are all first-class parts of the system rather than bolted on.
How does a public body buy eSourcing OS?
Through G-Cloud 15 (RM1557.15), where eSourcing Data lists services on the Digital Marketplace. A contracting authority can appoint eSourcing Data directly from the framework without running its own tender first, which means procuring the procurement platform is not itself a procurement.
Who builds eSourcing OS?
eSourcing Data, a UK procurement company that also runs procurement exercises end to end as an outsourced team for buyers who lack capacity. Building the software and running procurements on it are the same business, which is why the platform is shaped the way a buyer would build it rather than the way a software company would guess.
Does it support social value?
Yes, and as a transactional record rather than a questionnaire. Buyers define social value measures and evidence requirements at tender stage, suppliers commit measurable outcomes in their bid, the winning commitments become contract records, and delivery is reported and validated against them.
Is there an audit trail?
Yes. Every action is recorded with the actor, the change and a timestamp, which is what makes an award defensible if it is challenged. Evaluation carries the scores, the evaluator, the moderation and the final decision, so the reasoning behind an award can be reconstructed rather than remembered.
Can suppliers respond through it?
Yes. There is a supplier portal for registration, expressions of interest, clarifications, document exchange and submissions, so suppliers respond in one place rather than by email. Consortium and joint bidding is supported for suppliers bidding together.
Does it work alongside our existing ERP?
Yes. eSourcing OS covers source-to-contract and does not need to replace a finance system or an enterprise resource planning platform to be useful. Replacing an incumbent stack is not a precondition of adopting it.
Worth twenty minutes?
No pitch, and no demo unless you ask for one. If there is nothing we can usefully do, that is a useful answer too.