EUMETSAT Annual Report 2022

EUMETSAT ANNUAL REPORT 2022
Management and administration
New policies, tools
and work practices
For more than 20 years, document management
tools have been the cornerstone of EUMETSAT’s
most critical processes, a trusted repository for
decisions, technical documents, and other vital
records ensuring business continuity. For this
reason, EUMETSAT must ensure its information
repositories are up to date. The current tool, based on
Oracle WebCentre Content, served EUMETSAT well
for some 10 years but will not be supported in the
future, and needed to be replaced. Replacing the tool
with a new, modern one is key to how EUMETSAT
staff will continue to work together and evolve the
organisation’s institutional memory.
Following council approval of a procurement
proposal in July, an efficient tender evaluation board
process managed to issue an invitation to tender and
to evaluate all proposals received in time to submit a
contract proposal to the December council meeting.
The council agreed to the proposed selection
of M-files as the future EUMETSAT information
management tool.
A proposal to establish a procurement review
procedure for all open competitive procurements
valued at or above €100,000 also was approved at
the July council meeting. The procurement review
procedure offers a formal avenue of redress to
unsuccessful tenderers who claim a procedural
breach in the implementation of a procurement
action. It reinforces the principle of fair treatment by
making available objective legal recourse, allowing
tenderers to challenge the outcome of an open
competitive procurement action on the grounds
of procedural breach.
The practical implementation of the procedure involves
the appointment of a EUMETSAT Ombudsperson and
his or her alternate by the council in spring 2023. The
new procedure will become operational as soon as the
Ombudsperson has been nominated.
The December council meeting approved a
proposal to discontinue the function of financial
control. The proposal implements external auditors’
recommendations regarding the EUMETSAT internal
control framework made more than 10 years ago.
The new system will end a priori financial control,
replacing it with an audit only model.
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