In classic Swazi style Alison, our Country Director, received an invitation to participate in the Laboratory tender assessment session on a Friday for a meeting scheduled from Tuesday to Friday the next week. As the current link person to the laboratories this opportunity was quickly delegated to me. From my questions about the agenda and the process, it was clear that it was going to be a very different procurement process to anyone I have ever run or participated in…. It has been an fairly frustrating four days, and we haven’t finished, I’ve been advised we are needed back Monday and Tuesday next week as well.
All the tenders had been submitted as very weighty tomes (with an original document and 4 copies) and the meeting was run with strict formality, even though everyone in the room knows each other well and works together frequently, there was a chair and the procurement team of two where the ‘secretariat’ to document decisions and confirm the data the decisions were based on. I would have expected the procurement team to have reviewed, assessed all the tenders and then provided a summary of it to the assessment team to review and check some original documentation to confirm. In fact the opposite was the case, the assessment team was expected to review all of the tenders to confirm the information and criteria were met…. Which sounds kind of fine, until you have to check supplier by supplier (all 21 of them) that the 92 pages of pricing proposals have been correctly transcribed into excel and if they have quoted for the correct pack size. Then to review it all again to confirm they have authorization from all the manufactures they quote for to sell their material. I had suggested if we were going to eliminate the ones without manufacturing authorization we may want to do it the other way around, but it wasn’t supported. Painful is the only word for it, especially as 3 of us out of the 9 people in the room generated 75% of the output and the rest spent a lot of time talking about how hard work it was!
I have been commenting and capturing improvement suggestions as I go through, I just hope some of them will be taken on board, I think they are coming around to my number one suggestion of a pre-screening so they have a more reasonable number of suppliers to assess at this level of detail. Also, it seems as though the laboratory people are valuing the learning experience of going through the information in detail. And I hope they remember next year the importance of clearly defining assessment criteria up front and being very clear regarding the documentation you want suppliers to provide to enable you to do the assessment. Hopefully it will be downhill from here!
PS … I have been a bit late posting this, and it has not been downhill, it’s going to take longer than the additional 2 days they planned for at the end of last week…
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