 "Online Electronic Tendering")
Online tendering commonly known as e-Tendering or electronic tendering is when bidding or tendering is completed online, via a procurement portal. Buying Organisation publish their tenders via a portal and suppliers can respond and submit bids.
Why do Buying Organisations like tender portals? They can reach a wide network of net-enabled suppliers, saves resource time and effort in receiving, evaluating, and awarding contracts, as well as delivers in rich cache of supplier data that will support and enable better procurements through data and business intelligence.
e-Tendering can also drive legal compliance, ensure transparency, and deliver a fair an auditable procurement process. In fact, it’s a legal requirement for Public Sector organisations to use an electronic method of communicating and exchanging information (Regulation 22 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015).
As most questions are asked within the screen, suppliers are limited to formatting and Buyers cannot select one bid over another simply because its design is appealing. This allows for fair competition and means the bid is evaluated on content not style.
How does e-Tending work?
There is a good variety or portals used in Public Sector, but they all have similar functionality and process though they may look and feel different. Suppliers will be directed from the tender notice to the Buying Organisations tender portal and depending on the process there are a few minor differences, but this is what happens next.
- Click on a link to access the tender
- Supplier requested to register with a username, usually an email address and to create a password.
- Download or read the tender documentation.
- Suppliers submit an Expression of Interest (EOI) as intent to bid.
- Complete the Selection Questionnaire (or Pre-Qualification Questionnaire, PPQ)
- Complete the Award Questionnaire (AQ)
- Ask online clarification questions and see responses from the Buyers
- Upload all documents and respond to the tender
- The tender closes at a set time and no further responses can be received
- Buyers will begin evaluation and scoring of the bid submissions
- Award decision made
- Contract agreed with supplier
- Decision notified to all suppliers
Most Portals will not let you submit an incomplete bid or proceed if you haven’t answered all mandatory questions. Most questions require answering on screen; however some organisations still favour suppliers responding within documents and uploading the completed document back into the portal. This is usually because the questions or answers are too complex for the Portal to manage.
What to look out for
E-Tendering Portals have their place, they are great procurement tools for both suppliers and buyers but there are limitations. Procurement is complex, Public-Sector procurement even more so, Buyers have to ask a number of questions to get the answers they need to make an award decision. Answering these questions online can be time consuming for a supplier, especially if you don’t prepare them in advance. Question layouts can be confusing, responses can be limited with mandatory word counts.
If you are not familiar with answering or submitting a bid online, two things to think about. Don’t wait until the last day to submit your bid. It will go wrong, or you will run out of time and fail to submit. Give yourself a decent enough window to complete the response with time to spare.
Read the questions and prepare your answers in on offline document beforehand, so you are cutting and pasting answers that have been checked for spelling and grammar and are within word counts. Always save your answers after every question. If the portal refreshes itself, there’s a possibility you will lose what’s not been saved. Don’t lose all your data by waiting a long time to save, the portal could time out, the Wi-Fi could be lost, or your laptop could run out of power.