Any time a procurement is made, public contract rules and regulations make it a very important, yet time-consuming, activity. Determining the department’s needs, identifying the funds to make the purchase, choosing the correct type of procurement process, conducting the competitive bid or selection process, awarding the contract, and making the ultimate purchase all take immense amounts of planning.
An agency looking to streamline and automate this process should look for quick wins by addressing the “low-hanging fruit” – processes that can be quickly automated.
Developing Specifications
Specifications are required as part of any bid process to clearly outline the agency’s needs and provide an objective method for evaluation and acceptance or denial of a proposal. Details are important, as is capturing the capabilities for the vendor to provide new ideas or technology. To ensure fair competition, a specification should not be restrictive or swayed towards a specific product or supplier.
The “blank sheet of paper” approach to building specifications can be shortened with an online library of similar solicitations or other agency documents, from which applicable descriptions or clauses can be quickly copied and pasted to the upcoming solicitation. In addition, Artificial Intelligence technology can help perform market research on new technologies or methodologies or ensure the specifications are not taken from a specific manufacturer’s product line.
Creation of the Bid Package
When creating solicitations, most entities use boilerplate language that has already been reviewed and approved by legal counsel. However, specific paragraphs must be added or deleted based on a multitude of factors, including, but not limited to, liability and insurance, funding source requirements, indemnification, federal or state mandates, and department contact information.
For a complicated project in which multiple funding sources are used, there may be conflicting language that must be highlighted and addressed. Inaccurate or confusing terms and conditions can result in a no-bid situation or future confusion or potential litigation from the contracting community.
An effective eProcurement system can help you build solicitations based on a bid spec library of other similar projects and let you create documents using pre-built templates and clauses that feature already approved language. This ensures your projects include the correct language and meet compliance standards while being built quickly.
Bid Advertisement
Each entity has their own methodology for advertising bid opportunities, which can include posting on a website, publishing in a newspaper, mailing or emailing documents to a vendor list, or using a bid service. Greater outreach improves the possibility of receiving multiple bids and fostering a competitive environment.
Publishing opportunities online opens the door to greater vendor participation, expanding reach well beyond the agencies’ own geographical boundaries. Vendor databases that are easily accessed and shared allows more suppliers to be considered for inclusion. This can be especially helpful when attempting to increase minority or disadvantaged business participation, as specific companies can be pre-identified and pre-verified for inclusion in the outreach process.
Virtual Meetings
Pre-bid meetings and site visits have historically been done in person, requiring travel to and from government locations. But distance, weather, traffic, and accessibility concerns can often limit participation, and suppliers who reside outside of the area are almost certainly excluded. However, as the pandemic era proved, procurement can easily be conducted online, and both government and supplier teams are full capable of communicating and participating in bidding opportunities remotely.
Retaining virtual meetings and moving additional routine communications online may help save time, reduce personnel and travel costs, and enable better communication and more diverse bid responses for agencies.
Bid Opening and Evaluation
Like pre-bid meetings and site visits, travel to an in-person bid opening can be time-consuming or prohibitive. Meeting rooms must be scheduled, and procurement staff must be on hand. Moving the bid opening and evaluation online to an eProcurement system with a project evaluation module helps streamline the process. An effective eProcurement system can ensure that bids submitted online are secure, encrypted, and sealed until opening. Once opened, the system can set up evaluation criteria, including line itemization, calculate math computations for net terms, and allow evaluators to assess bidders effectively, score proposals objectively, and communicate effortlessly.
Ensure that your bids are being evaluated on key factors while documenting every step of the decision-making processes for efficient, transparent evaluations.
Automating this step eliminates ineligible bids and frees up individual evaluators to collaborate, make viewable comments in real-time, and override system scoring if necessary. Accepted bid results and award to suppliers are provided more quickly, with better transparency into the evaluation process to improve public trust.
Awarding and Managing of the Contract
Once all bids have been evaluated and scored, the contract is awarded to the vendor who meets all requirements and/or provides the best value. With better automation, communications with the both the successful and unsuccessful contractors can be done online, and any protests can be addressed with all required documentation and actions related to the solicitation readily available.
An eProcurement system can quickly produce this information, including time stamps when the supplier downloaded information and submitted responses as part of the official record. This is helpful in the case of a supplier who did not submit by the deadline or did not meet an addendum requirement, as the system produces documented timelines for each step and communication throughout the solicitation process.
Benefits of Moving to Automation
For an organization trying to justify the purchase of an eProcurement system, highlighting the benefits of the software is key:
1. Immediacy of Services
With self-service capabilities, vendors and users can access information or fill out forms via secure website, rather than calling an office or sending an email or hard copy bid proposal. The system is available 24/7 from any location, allowing suppliers to view opportunities and respond during timeframes that are most convenient for them.
2. Benchmarking and Spend Analysis
Routing contract purchases through an online system gives the agency immediate insight into spend data for services and commodities. This data can then be used to benchmark against future purchase levels, service levels, and other data points. Immediate visibility into pricing also drives contract compliance on the part of the vendors, as contract items, pricing, and service agreements are online and easily reportable.
3. Budgetary Savings
Aggregating purchases and insight into spend categories can result in better negotiation positions for contract renewals and future solicitations. eProcurement also leads to a dramatic reduction in rogue spend, as it helps detect where waste is occurring so purchasing office can identify and mitigate the causes.
4. Efficiencies for Staff
Online approvals are faster and free up staff time to concentrate on more strategic, high-dollar procurements. The digitalization of contract information and reporting makes compliance checks easier. For Freedom of Information Act requests, information regarding any bid process can be quickly retrieved from the system and provided within the legislated deadlines.
An organization can benefit in dozens of ways from eProcurement. Identifying and automating the low-hanging fruit opportunities first can increase staff efficiencies and drive potential savings.
SHARE
