The Brazilian Ministry of Planning, Development, and Management is relying on a complex procurement system that displays prices based on multiple technologies, such as Java, PHP, ASP, etc. As a result, the data lacked any standardization whatsoever, making it very difficult to be used efficiently for the completion of purchases. Moreover, 90% of federal government entities were unable to access the system. Consequently, the government was paying higher prices as suppliers controlled price estimates and benefited from the lack of pricing data.

After eighteen years, the Ministry of Planning created a Price Dashboard to help the government verify the price it needs to pay for each service or product. This Dashboard allowed the government to spend more effectively, especially since it can now check the costs and no longer has to overpay suppliers.

The Ministry of Planning collaborated with the Analytics and Data Integration Platform, Qlik, to develop the Price Dashboard, which allows public employees to compare prices previously paid by the government in exchange for services, such as professional training courses, road maintenance, or goods like vaccines and stationery. Furthermore, officials can now be informed of any change in the prices of a particular service or product throughout the year, in addition to viewing the number of suppliers in every region of the country. This information helps officials understand market prices, better implement procurement tasks for government projects, and find out if the seller is changing prices unfairly. The Price Dashboard led to three main improvements in government procurement.

The first improvement is streamlining price comparisons for public employees by providing an easy-to-use benchmark database. Before the launch of this project in 2017, the government relied on a system with all price-related information for government procurement. However, this was an old system and was based on multiple programming languages, which made it impossible to compare stored databased with others. In other words, despite the availability of data, the transparency needed to track all previous prices was non-existent. For example, when using the system to search for the price of a water bottle, it generated over 40 results, forcing employees to do a lot of guesswork rather than develop data-driven insights. In the absence of a reliable standard for reference or any other method to use data and prove suppliers error, purchasing goods and services was highly risky.

The second improvement allowed everyone to access the Price Dashboard, whether they are public employees or members of the community so that prices can be viewed. This entails more transparent purchases at lower, fairer prices. This was not an option in the old system, as public employees were unable to access the system and freely view the stored information. Moreover, 9 out of 10 federal entities were unable to access the government price database through the old system. Information about the market prices of goods and services was not available to a large number of public employees responsible for purchasing them.

The Ministry of Planning chose to publish government spending information to the public as part of the Brazilian government’s commitment to transparency and accountability. Brazil is participating in the Open Government Partnership and plans to make data on land, environment, and water management open within the year. The Price Dashboard has reduced the time needed for public employees to search for prices thanks to the user-friendly interface, thus increasing efficiency and effectiveness. The search process used to take up to 20 days, but now users can search for prices in 11 minutes.

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