Back in March 2004, the European Commission introduced the concept of Competitive Dialogue with the publication of Directive 2004/18/EC. Consequently, the OGC produced a document Competitive Dialogue in 2008.
This guidance document raises the issues of treating the vendors equally during the dialogue phase of the procedure. When I developed guidance and training material for the Revenue in Ireland, I felt the best way to ensure equality was to develop and maintain a set of reference documents for the procurement. These documents would include the Joint Statement of Intent, draft RFP, draft commercial terms and requirement specification. They would be published on a server accessible by the vendors and updated with new releases during the procedure. With suitable version control and email notices to the vendors – issue solved.
Long before Competitive Dialogue was developed, I came across a great tactic which would fit into the Competitive Dialogue procedure. Shell was building an oil blending plant. Internally they had developed a high level requirement for the IT systems that would manage and control the plant; this requirement was perhaps fifty pages in length. What Shell needed was a detailed functional specification against which the IT procurement could be made.
Shell went through a normal long list, RFI, short list process and selected three system integrators (SI). Each SI was then required to put forward an experienced designer who joined a specification team managed by a Shell manager on Shell premises. The SI’s were paid on a T&M basis for their designers. Over a three month period the team turned the high level requirements document into a full functional specification (running to several large volumes).
The team was disbanded and the designers returned to their respective companies and joined the bid team. Shell issued the RFP with, of course, the RFP attached. The now knowledgeable bid teams produced three great proposals. Sema won the bid and went on to implement successfully the solution; there were no surprises and no misunderstandings.
I feel that this ‘Shell trick’ is better than employing a team from another organisation who will not be bidding for the implementation. My experience is that bid prices often differ because the vendors do not have a clear understanding of what is required. The better the understanding, the closer the bid prices become to each other; a win-win for all parties concerned.
Ian Richmond
Email: ‘About’ and ‘Email Me’ link
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