Procurement

In all regions of its presence, Unipro conducts active procurement aimed at purchasing the necessary equipment and services in a competitive market within the investment programme and the annual repair and targeted programmes.

The primary document governing the Company’s procurement is the Regulation on Procurement of Unipro PJSC12 which describes the standard business process for meeting the production demand of Unipro PJSC and is related to other internal documents of the Company. The Policy contains mandatory rules for procuring works, services, and software licenses, including responsibility limits and description of procurement processes.

Procurement procedures aim at a tender-based selection of suppliers, contractors, and service Unipro Procurement Principles providers. Thus, the best economic conditions for procurement are provided: meeting customer requirements, deadlines, quality, and best prices.

Responsibility for implementing procurement processes in the Company rests with the Procurement Unit, which main functions include planning, organisation and implementation of procurement procedures. Moreover, the Procurement Unit implements measures for strengthening the market position by consolidating needs, and ensuring the unification of procurement processes, as well as a single model of behaviour in the competitive environment. In doing so, the Procurement Unit closely interacts with the applicant units, participating in consolidating the Company’s commercial and technical interests.

In order to increase the competition and to ensure the procurement transparency, competitive procurement procedures are announced at the corporate website of Unipro PJSC (in the Procurement Section at https://unipro. energy/purchase/), electronic trading platforms are being used more widely. In 2020, the electronic trading platforms B2B Center and RTSTender were used to make a part of the procurement of Unipro PJSC.

An accreditation process was developed for potential participants which would like to take part in the procurement procedures. Such process makes it possible to assess their reliability and to minimize the risks of joint efforts. The accreditation in the supplier base of the Company is carried out in accordance with the rules posted on the official website of the Company. The accreditation of the potential participants is valid for one year from the date when it is entered in the supplier database.

By results of the fulfilment of contracts, the performance of the suppliers is assessed and they may be assessed according to the following criteria:

• products and services quality;
• timeliness of delivery and performance of work;
• compliance with the safety requirements;
• compliance with the environmental requirements;
• promptness and efficiency in eliminating deficiencies;
• organization of the project and of the construction site;
• quality of the working documentation being provided;
• accuracy and timeliness of the provision of primary accounting records;
• professional strengths of the staff (experience, competencies, etc.);
• cooperation and flexibility;
• quality of subcontractors management.

The Company’s procurement is arranged as part of the general Procure-to-Pay (P2P) process, that is an ongoing process based on a unified automated enterprise management system, covers the stages of purchasing products (goods, works, services) by the Company, from creating a purchase request until the full performance of financial obligations under the signed contracts, and links all involved subdivisions of the Company.

As part of the development and the improvement of the procurement process management system, great attention is paid to both expanding the competitive environment, the individual (categorical) approach to the procurement, increasing the transparency of the procurement process and to the automation using state-of-the-art digitalization tools, and making a unified ongoing process that links all stages of purchasing the products, enables to automate controls as much as possible, to eliminate duplicate operations and, as a result, to increase the efficiency of the P2P process.

In the new year, the Procurement Unit expects to continue working on expanding the categorical approach to the procurement, automating and digitalizing the procurement processes, reducing duplicate, “manual” controls and minimizing the bureaucratic, in particular “paper” component in the P2P process.

In order to support the Company’s activities, buyers of Unipro PJSC held 5,625 procurements for the total amount of RUB 7,989,680.79 thousand (net of VAT) for the needs of 2020. Out of the said amount, 304 procedures for RUB 1,128,699.66 thousand were carried out as purchase from a single supplier (14.1% of the total volume of procurement in monetary terms).

All other transactions were made through tenders. The share of competitive purchases in a closed form was less than 1%.

The difference between the value of the most favourable initially submitted comparable proposal and the value specified in the contract in the course of competitive procedures (economic benefit from procurement) was (in monetary terms) RUB 348,482.97 thousand (6.9%).

In 2020, the share of procurement from local (Russian) suppliers amounted to 99.9% of the procurement in monetary terms. 204-1

In 2020, the share of procurement from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) amounted to 59.1% of the procurement in monetary terms.