Time to introduce online tendering
Thursday, 23 July 2009
Salahuddin Ahmed
The development of new technologies has brought about a real change in the life of the people of the world in the 21st century. Countries around the globe use these technologies to get things done in a more efficient way and more expeditiously. But we lag behind others in the use of such technologies. For example, we still depend on old-fashioned tendering process that encourages corruption and inefficiency.
The online tendering system is a tendering solution that facilitates the complete tendering process from the advertisement of the requirement to the granting of the contract. The fundamental objective of this system is to ensure that government procurement activities get the best value for money in supporting the delivery of government services.
This system integrates online collaborative technologies with procurement automation to enable purchasing teams to compile detailed tender documents and simultaneously invite tender submissions online by a specified closing date. Suppliers' tenders are published as sealed bids into an online 'safe deposit box'. Specified representatives can only open them on the pre-determined tender opening date. The user-friendly system ensures easy response from the suppliers even with no knowledge of online tendering systems. The system can offer many advantages that will make a revolution in the public procurement process.
In online system, tender box works as virtual and thus tender information and further processing can be accessible using either mobile terminal equipped with mini web browsers and GPRS modems or a computer (desktop, laptop or pocket PC), as both are available at an affordable cost. Tender information can be maintained in a virtual (electronic) calendar on the web for easy finding and ensuring strict confidentiality. The users can subscribe for tender alerts of specific tender categories, thus the web application can alert when a new tender is published (or on various tender events, such as three days before a tender closes) via SMS, e-mail or fax.
In online system, regardless of bidders' location on the earth and time zone, they can submit their bid document anytime from anywhere until the tender submission date expires.
This system ensures further advantages, especially from administrators' viewpoint. This system is an automatic process management using specific softwares. Usually there are a number of processes involved in tender from publishing to dropping and closing. If a bidder submits a bid document with incomplete or wrong information, automated system can quickly check such errors and incompleteness without any human intervention; and without human interaction, the system can send notification to bidders to check the errors for correction that is time consuming in traditional system.
It may be a little hard to motivate people using this system in the right away since we are used to using traditional system. The government may launch extensive advertisement of this system to draw people's attention to the system for its transparency and efficiency.
Our neighbouring country, India, has already introduced online tender system. In many places in Africa, this system is becoming popular. In Malaysia, this system has been introduced. Works Minister in Malaysia, Datuk Seri Mohd Zin Mohamed, mentions that the electronic tender management system can improve the quality of information dissemination and also ensure transparency and integrity of the procurement process that includes four phases, starting with advertising the tenders online up to the evaluation process.
As we have embraced the concept of Digital Bangladesh, we should now introduce the online tendering system. This will bring about a real positive change in the public procurement process.
(The writer is an MBA Student & Graduate Assistant at Ashland University, OH, USA. He can be reached at e-mail: sahmed@ashland.edu)
The development of new technologies has brought about a real change in the life of the people of the world in the 21st century. Countries around the globe use these technologies to get things done in a more efficient way and more expeditiously. But we lag behind others in the use of such technologies. For example, we still depend on old-fashioned tendering process that encourages corruption and inefficiency.
The online tendering system is a tendering solution that facilitates the complete tendering process from the advertisement of the requirement to the granting of the contract. The fundamental objective of this system is to ensure that government procurement activities get the best value for money in supporting the delivery of government services.
This system integrates online collaborative technologies with procurement automation to enable purchasing teams to compile detailed tender documents and simultaneously invite tender submissions online by a specified closing date. Suppliers' tenders are published as sealed bids into an online 'safe deposit box'. Specified representatives can only open them on the pre-determined tender opening date. The user-friendly system ensures easy response from the suppliers even with no knowledge of online tendering systems. The system can offer many advantages that will make a revolution in the public procurement process.
In online system, tender box works as virtual and thus tender information and further processing can be accessible using either mobile terminal equipped with mini web browsers and GPRS modems or a computer (desktop, laptop or pocket PC), as both are available at an affordable cost. Tender information can be maintained in a virtual (electronic) calendar on the web for easy finding and ensuring strict confidentiality. The users can subscribe for tender alerts of specific tender categories, thus the web application can alert when a new tender is published (or on various tender events, such as three days before a tender closes) via SMS, e-mail or fax.
In online system, regardless of bidders' location on the earth and time zone, they can submit their bid document anytime from anywhere until the tender submission date expires.
This system ensures further advantages, especially from administrators' viewpoint. This system is an automatic process management using specific softwares. Usually there are a number of processes involved in tender from publishing to dropping and closing. If a bidder submits a bid document with incomplete or wrong information, automated system can quickly check such errors and incompleteness without any human intervention; and without human interaction, the system can send notification to bidders to check the errors for correction that is time consuming in traditional system.
It may be a little hard to motivate people using this system in the right away since we are used to using traditional system. The government may launch extensive advertisement of this system to draw people's attention to the system for its transparency and efficiency.
Our neighbouring country, India, has already introduced online tender system. In many places in Africa, this system is becoming popular. In Malaysia, this system has been introduced. Works Minister in Malaysia, Datuk Seri Mohd Zin Mohamed, mentions that the electronic tender management system can improve the quality of information dissemination and also ensure transparency and integrity of the procurement process that includes four phases, starting with advertising the tenders online up to the evaluation process.
As we have embraced the concept of Digital Bangladesh, we should now introduce the online tendering system. This will bring about a real positive change in the public procurement process.
(The writer is an MBA Student & Graduate Assistant at Ashland University, OH, USA. He can be reached at e-mail: sahmed@ashland.edu)