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Dear Sacha,
I'm
sure I don't need to tell you that searching for something on the
Internet is a tricky prospect. Even if you know exactly what
you're looking for you may draw a blank. But, really, that's not
a bad place to start. If you look for something one way and find
nothing, you know you need to begin looking another way or
elsewhere. The difficulties begin when you don't know exactly
what you're looking for and you turn up millions of results. In
my experience it becomes tempting to jump at the first promising result
I find, which why care is called for. Often that first result
turns out to be a dud, after all.
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| Who vs. Who? |
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Two very different models
An
online search for e-procurement or government bidding is very
insightful. Once the results that are not of interest to us are
sorted out, there remain a considerable number of hits that have
something to do with government bids. Some provide help to
businesses, especially those with no previous government experience,
find and bid for government contracts. Many others provide lists
of available government contracts.
As always, some do the job
better than others. Those who do it well do it very well,
indeed. All these sites do, however, share one thing in common:
they target suppliers. When you run this search, the one thing
you won't find is a business that targets buyers. To highlight
the differences between the two we will call them:
Buyer Centric vs. Supplier Centric
Supplier
centric sites were the easier, and thus the first, answer to giving
government contracts a greater online presence. They are a quick
and easily available means for suppliers to hear about these contracts
and they fill this role well. Although many supplier centric
sites offer additional services today, this is as far as they go.
It is a convenient shortcut to say buyers "use" these sites, but that
isn't the case at all. There is nothing here for buyers to use.
Buyer centric sites like the ElectronicTender System
are a rare animal. This is no surprise, since being able to meet
a buyer's needs is a much more difficult and involved task. There
is considerably more to this than putting up a website where a
procurement department can post its information. Besides, that's
a long way from helping make the department paperless.
The basic
litmus test for a buyer centric solution is this: can the buyers use it
to do their work? It needs allow a buyer to do everything online,
from collecting the pre-bid information to putting the bid together, to
posting it, to receiving electronic bids. If it can't do this
much then it has failed the test and it simply isn't a buyer centric
site.
The most important difference between a supplier centric
site and a buyer centric solution is that the buyer centric is
e-government where the supplier centric is not.
To provide a quick overview of the differences between the two, here is a list of the pros and cons for each:
Buyer Centric
Pros
- An e-Government Procurement Solution
- buyer maintains control of their e-presence
- buyer has real functionality
- Virtual Hierarchy - dynamic and alive
- Pre-Bid module
- create & send Addenda and Corrigenda
- Bid Documents (priced or for free)
- no assumptions - you assume other sites give you 100% coverage
- Cheaper for suppliers **
- more suppliers participate, not only medium to large corporations
- larger supplier base - more bids, more competition
- Buyer exposure increases due to greater supplier participation
Cons
- More expensive for buyer *
- Not as supplier centric - fewer services for suppliers
Supplier Centric
Pros
- Less expensive for buyer
- Customized supplier experience
- account executive helps suppliers
Cons
- No buyer control
- must trust 3rd party
- no choice, no recourse
- Not e-government
- Significant cost to suppliers
* Buyers go from $0 for zero utility to full funcionality at a modest cost.
** Suppliers can save up to 500%, sometimes even more.
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With
the low costs available through an on-demand system like the ETS, there
is nothing not to recommend about a buyer centric system. While
they do provide less utility to suppliers, the supplier centric sites
will still be available to those suppliers who can afford them.
For those who can't, a buyer centric system will still provide some
functionality for a fraction of the cost.
It's certainly a concept worth thinking about.
Sincerely,
Sacha Hartmann
YSER Inc.
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