The military budget of the State Community of Serbia and Montenegro in 2003 is close to 60 billion dinars i.e. €920 million. It has been estimated that out of this total budget, 30-40% will be spent on public procurement, that is approximately €300 million. If the military public procurement system manage to achieve savings of 9% as much as was accomplished in the second half of 2002 in the public procurement sector, the potential savings gained would amount to €30 million.

Aiming to achieve this savings and to prevent abuses in expenditure of public money allocated for the military, the Ministry of Defense decided to introduce the new procurement procedures as one of the first steps in military reform process. These new procedures are actually the procedures that have been applied for a year in the Republic of Serbia and that gave positive results and savings. Procurements that would be exempt from these contract award procedures are procurements of armaments and other procurements of confidential nature as prescribed by special regulations, whereas the award of any other public contracts (such as procurement of cloths and footwear, food, medicine and medical equipment etc) will be subject to the PPL procedures.

The efficient and effective implementation of the PPL procurement procedures in a large and complex system such as the military, requires the establishment of a special body that will be committed to the stringent adherence to the public procurement procedures. Therefore, the Ministry of Defense made a decision to set up a new entity - the Public Procurement Office of the Ministry of Defense.

In order to provide training for selected military officers of established high personal integrity and authority, so as to prepare them for undertaking such an important activity as the public procurement, the Ministry of Defense has asked the PPO to arrange the special seminar for the future staff members of the PPO of the Ministry of Defense.

The seminar began in June 27th, lasted three weeks and ended in July 16th. It was specially prepared to train 40 persons out of which 20 most successful attendants will form the team for the new public procurement body that will be established within the Ministry. The training was very intensive and consisted of three components:

• Lectures on basic procurement procedures and on protection of the bidders rights (open, restricted tendering, negotiated procedure, procedure for low-value contracts)
• Practical exercises - practical tasks and examples related to the given lectures
• Tests - the practical examination of the course participants and seminar evaluation

For the purposes of training of public officials, the PPO has prepared materials that are disseminated on the seminar: the Manual "Pubic Procurement - secondary legislation - Comments with Cases, where all the secondary legislations were published with detailed explanations of the provisions contained therein. The Manual also contains the Model Notices on Public Procurement as a model regulation providing separate templates for each type of procurement procedures and for each subject (goods, services and works) of public contracts. Along with these templates practical examples are given so as to demonstrate how public contract notices should look like in practice. For each type of procurement procedure a special graphic presentations are designed to facilitate the understanding and present the logical sequence of the activities to be undertaken by both procuring entities and tenderers in the course of public procurement procedures.

The PPO has also published the Model Tender Documents - one set of documents is made for the procurement of vehicles and the other set of documents for the procurement of safety services and insurance services. By these two practical examples: one for goods and the other for services, the procuring entities are given the detailed and comprehensive model documents that only need to bee adjusted to the specific subject of public contract. These materials have also been disseminated during the seminar.

For the purpose of this specific seminar, the PPO has also prepared special tests for the course participants, giving them practical tasks related to conducting the procurement procedures, so as to evaluate their knowledge acquired. After the seminar was concluded, based on the test results, the participants were ranked and the ones who performed most successfully will form the PPO of the Ministry of Defense.