Competitive Procurement Process
Helping a globally leading volunteer organisation deliver a technology to improve volunteer engagement and community benefits that ultimately saves lives.
Project
THE PROBLEM
A large volunteer based agency needed to replace its aging online infrastructure with a new online system for staff and customers within an organisational environment with diverse constraints, including time-intensive seasonal community activities, prioritised funds and tightly committed support resources.
Key issues facing the project included the need to identify and engage potential market suppliers, provide rigours project estimates, test solution requirements, and engage confirm supplier capabilities all the while ensuring that the key internal business units were kept informed and were able to provide their valuable input to key decisions.
Results
OUR APPROACH
We established a business consulting approach that addressed these issues while maintaining cost efficiency and procurement probity. We presented the agency with two alternative procurement approaches. One was to issue a Request for Quotation (RFQ), in which a formal tender was to be developed and issued to vendors. The other was to conduct a Competitive Dialogue Process, where a preliminary statement of requirements is issued to pre-selected suppliers, seeking an indication on feasibility, their capability and interest. This informative process is iterative and culminates in the receipt of formal responses
The client elected to proceed with the Competitive Dialogue Process. and it provided opportunity to informally engage selected market suppliers to test requirements and identify current, emerging and innovative approaches. The agency saw value in the earlier confirmation of scope, budget, cost estimates which better informed interrelated business activities, such as the development of the business case and benefited from the improved shared understanding and cultural fit between potential suppliers and client through collaboration. The competitive dialogue process ultimately decreases negotiation timeframes, despite additional dialogue processes, due to improved overall project understanding by all parties.
THE OUTCOME
The project saw highly engaged agency stakeholders and market suppliers and an improved project scope, informed by discussions and feedback. We were able to elicit quality procurement responses and comparable, competitively priced solutions for the agency which help deliver high quality procurement outcomes and efficient use of agency resources. The agency felt comfortable with this model of procurement, as the competitive dialogue process allows successful respondents to ‘hit the ground running’.