Since it started life as pilot project in 2001 to support EU procurement strategies, the eTenders website has been one of Ireland’s e-government success stories.
Along with the Revenue Online Service, the national public procurement website www.etenders.gov.ie has picked up its fair share of plaudits and is recognised at home and abroad as an exemplar of how new technologies can transform public sector processes.
Run out of the Department of Finance, it is a central facility for all public sector contracting authorities looking to advertise tenders. Currently, 38,627 suppliers are registered with the service.
“It has grown substantially and we maintain a very clean database with everyone renewing their registration every year, so the figures are very accurate,” says Liz Nolan, assistant principal in the National Public Procurement Policy Unit.
Around 4,000 tenders are awarded each year through the site. Only contracts with a certain value threshold set by the EU can advertise tenders, a figure that depends on the organisation. The threshold would, for example, be different for a local authority than central government. “We recommend that anyone with a contract worth over €50,000 should advertise and most do unless it’s an urgent requirement in which case they would invite companies to quote,” says Nolan.
As the number of signed up vendors suggests, the stakeholders for the service are mostly up to speed with the site and what it’s for, but there is still an ongoing education job to be done. “We still run workshops because there are always new suppliers. And there is a lot more functionality on the site than there would have been,” she says. Two workshops have been held in the past six months and the unit would do more if it had the resources.
Lobby groups such as the Irish Software Association have been harsh critics when it comes to public procurement, complaining that indigenous technology companies in particular were losing out to larger international suppliers. Nolan says that the unit has always sought to achieve a more level playing and says feedback from the local small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) community has generally been good.
“We try to encourage smaller companies to tender and encourage contracting authorities to consider them. The feedback with smaller suppliers is always good; they seem to be more flexible and they are less caught up in red tape,” she says. “We encourage SMEs to aim for smaller contracts. From there, they can build up their experience and credibility in the marketplace.”
The beauty of the eTenders site is that it successfully delivers on the e-government promise, cutting down paperwork and improving the channels of communication. By using the site to publish notices, as opposed to post, fax or even email, contractors save time and money. There is even a facility whereby the supplied data files are automatically sent through to European public procurement channels in accordance with EU regulation on contracts of a certain value.
There is still, however, a lot of paper in the procurement process, with vendors compiling and copying hundreds of pages of documentation. “Our ongoing ambition is to try and standardise the paperwork to reduce the load, in documents going out to suppliers as well as what comes back in,” says Nolan. “We want a tendering system that takes a contracting authority all the way though from creating their notice online and advertising it to the awarding of the contract.”
There is already a facility for the end-to-end online submission of tenders, which cuts out the paperwork completely, but less than half of contracts are procured in this way. Some authorities use it all the time and no longer accept paper applications; others never use it at all.
“A lot depends on whether the contractor has a central procurement office. Unfortunately, in Ireland the way it usually works is that whoever has the requirement does the tendering,” she says. “If they have never done it before they will take the paper-based route. There is a misperception that it is quite difficult to do it all online, hence the workshops which are for buyers as well as suppliers.”
One of the barriers to submitting digital documents has been broadband availability. “We have a lot of suppliers still on a dial-up internet service which restricts the size of the files they can download and what they can send,” says Nolan. “We tell contracting authorities and suppliers to limit their tender documents to around 2MB to facilitate people without broadband so they are not tying up a phone line for hours and timing out.”
As well as the events a bi-monthly electronic newsletter is also used to keep suppliers in the loop and encourage a better understanding of the eTenders process. Company profiles and news stories make it a useful addendum to the service. There is also the eProcurement Network (Eprocnet), run by Nolan, which provides a platform for exchanging information around policies and an opportunity for various stakeholders to discuss issues.
One of the hot topics of the moment is procurement through eAuctions, an open and transparent online competition where suppliers can bid against each other in real time. To date, only Bord Na Móna has conducted an e-auction for a fuel contract in 2004. “There has been a lot interest, but so far no one else has gone as far as actually running one,” says Nolan.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Ian Campbell
Quelle/Source: Siliconrepublic, 14.04.2008
