Tuesday, September 22, 2020

e-GP system can catalyze development

The introduction of an electronic government procurement system (e-GP system) can also help catalyze economic development by stimulating policy and institutional reforms from the Public Financial Management viewpoint, a senior Treasury official told the Daily News Business yesterday.

He said that the ease of access to procurement opportunities and e- participation in public procurement is particularly beneficial to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which tend to face several challenges in competing with larger, more experienced tenderers.

He also said that the automation of bidding processes for all processes and procurement methods for goods, works, and services including Bid Clarifications (with sub-modules for Request for Bids, (RFB)/Quotations/Expression of Interest, Issuance of Bid/Quotations/Proposal/EOI, Clarifications & Complaint handling, Submission of Bids/Receipt of Bids/ Bid Openings) will also be present with the new system.

Automation of Evaluation of Bids for all methods and types of procurements (automatically) will also be done.

The other advantages will be that contract awarding will also be done that way and payments handling through a Payment Gateway with the interaction of the banks selected by the purchaser will also be done.

This system will also enable Procurement Management and Performance Monitoring and e-Catalog implementation.

All the essential modules have been completed and the system is now being adopted by a number of government organizations, including some public enterprises, provincial councils, state banks etc.

This system can be used for shopping, National Competitive Bidding (NCB), International Competitive Bidding (ICB), Framework agreement, Expression of Interest (EOI) which help fast tract prevailing time-consuming Procurement Time Schedule (PTS), while increasing transparency, competition, fairness, and efficiency.

As of September 4, 2020, 125 Liaison Officers for 73 procuring entities and 326 vendors have registered with the e-GP System. They are at different stages of implementation of the System.

With the presentation of the new Annual Budget for 2021, it is envisaged that all public entities will embark on adopting e-GP System for administering their procurements.

Key modules in the e-GP System; The e-GP System was designed as an indigenous system after studying those of many counties and consists of the following modules.

Registration of vendors for goods, works, and services and categorization of same using the Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV) with Interfaces for Registration Authorities (Registrar of Companies, Construction Industry Development Authority, National Medicines Regulatory Authority, etc) if such Registration Authorities agree to provide web services or APIs for System Integration.

Registration of all the procuring entities of the Public Sector and State-Owned Enterprises, budget allocations, procurement plans, and procurement activity schedule for all procurement types and preparation and publication of requests for bids including technical specifications.

Author:

0 comments: