In a ceremony today, the European Defence Agency signed the contract for an Effective Procurement Methods Pilot Case on Basic Logistics Services for the EU Battle Group. Representing EDA, Deputy Chief Executive Adam Sowa signed the contract with Karsten Deiseroth, the Senior Vice President of IABG, the German technology company, and Massimo Ciano, the CEO of Ciano Group, an Italian logistics company. Also present was General Håkan Syrén, Chairman of the EU Military Committee, and representatives from the sponsoring Member States: Austria, Czech Republic and Germany.
Effective Procurement Methods (EPM) is an EDA work strand under the umbrella of the wider Pooling & Sharing initiative. It focusses on identifying common (off-the-shelf) demand of groups of Member States and translating these into a common procurement. This pooling of demand should lead to benefits from increased competition and economies of scale. Moreover, more frequent use of common procurement mechanisms will support European defence industry in its efforts to increase cross-border consolidation, and lead to more interoperability between European Armed Forces.
This contract forms one of the first EPM pilot cases. It constitutes a Framework Contract on Basic Logistic Services (Food, Water, Sales Goods) for the Battle Group 2012/2, for the benefit of Austria, Czech Republic and Germany. A consortium of IABG and Ciano was awarded the contract on 29 May 2012, which is worth up to 228m Euros.