In the private sector, relationship development is a large part of the procurement process – it is obviously critical to the success of relationship-based procurement.
An improved supplier-customer relationship can also lead to improved levels of service. Often, senior management of a supplier has little immediate knowledge of the dealings between the municipality and the supplier.
Therefore, if a municipality is having difficulty with its supplier or requires an improvement in service, making contact with those managers – not in a hostile way, but so as to discuss how service might be improved – can lead to significant progress. Clearly, it is the purchasing manager who has the critical role to play in this area as the natural interface between the client department and the supplier.
The goal of this process is not just to maintain existing supply relationships. It is to expand on them. In my experience, many private sector entities shy away from competing for government work.
One of the most common reasons advanced in explanation for this reluctance to bid is government work is subject to “too much red-tape.”
From the context in which this term appears, many businesses shy away from government work because they have had bad experiences resulting from the exacting demands imposed upon the conduct of a government contract competition under the law of tender.
In a disturbingly high number of cases, highly qualified bidders fail to submit a qualified bid. Bids are received too late (perhaps a minute or two after closing of the tender) or are missing certain critical information (e.g., consents to security background checks) or components (e.g., bonds or other security).
Subject to the need to ensure proper qualifications, a municipality should encourage prospective suppliers to bid. The municipal purchasing operation is not a gate-keeping function.
An important role for the purchasing department while a tender for a major capital project is out for bid is to ensure all prospective bidders understand properly how to go about submitting a qualified bid for the contract.
Sloppily prepared and incomplete bid documents often leave government acquisition officials with no choice but to reject a bid that might very well have been awarded the contract if put together properly. Ultimately, it is the government that pays for these mistakes.
As important as government contracts are to the overall economy, they make up a minority of the total work available to the private sector. The open, competitive system of contract award is a process with which many private sector companies are only barely familiar. As a result, many bidders make simple mistakes in preparing their bids not realizing those mistakes constitute deal-breakers.
In a market based economy, a strong argument can be made that suppliers and their customers should each look after their own respective interests. Ideally, every large business should have a dedicated staff member who is experienced in winning government contracts. The reality is most do not.
Since municipalities generally benefit from receiving more competitive bids than less, the onus falls on the purchasing department of each municipality to provide reasonable support to bidders so that the maximum number possible are put in a position to submit a competitive quote for a tender or RFP.
However, the responsibilities of the purchasing department do not end there. The tender and RFP documents need to be carefully scrutinized before they are issued by a municipality. The fundamental goal of this process is to facilitate the understanding of the prospective suppliers as to what it is the municipality is trying to buy.
One lives for the day when some municipality wins the Nobel Prize in literature for its front-end tender documents. However, even if that day is unlikely to come, there is no reason why such documents should look and read like they have been put through a blender.
