Member States should communicate to all successful tenderers the benefits of transparent and competitive tendering and supplier diversity for subcontracts, and develop and disseminate best practice on supply-chain management in the defence and security markets.

In the context of defence and security markets, the Member States and the Commission should also encourage the development and dissemination of best practices between Member States and European industry with a view to promoting free movement and competitiveness in Union subcontracting markets, as well as the effective management of suppliers and SMEs, in order to achieve the best value for money.

subcontracting of tasks relating to the overall management of the project.

The Commission today adopted more specific measures in two major areas of its externalisation policy concerning the management of Community programmes: the management of Community programmes through networks of national agencies and the outsourcing of technical and administrative assistance in the execution of Community programmes.

In order to gain a clearer picture of the way in which subcontracting is organized in Japan, the Commission sent a fact-finding mission to that country in late 1988, which included representatives of subcontracting intermediaries in all the Member States. The mission provided an opportunity to study the possibilities for and limitations on transposing the Japanese subcontracting model to Europe and was an extremely valuable learning experience concerning the management and efficiency of an industrial production system based on an extensive network of subcontractors, with special reference to the new methods of organizing component produc ...[+++]tion (just-in-time or "kanban" manufacture).

The State, the EC, should develop, I believe, a long-term strategy articulated around some main ideas : - to control the external growth of the sector by setting up a real European "filiere", capable of treating its world competitors as an equal; - to restore an industry of components within this European "filiere", so as to avoid an outside sub-contracting policy that reduces profit margins, the know-how and the mastery of the industry in some key- sectors, such as software, maintenance, training; - to impluse an upstream cooperation with the Public Authorities, right from the definition phase; - to set up a forward-looking employmen ...[+++]t and training policy, in full cooperation with the Trade Unions.