Rationalising the tender process

Capacity Infrastructure Services (Capacity) approached Sinclair Knight Merz (SKM) to develop a streamlined system to ‘lift the veil’ on their procurement of physical works. Capacity previously received tender evaluation reports of varying quality, with inconsistencies between tender assessment team’s evaluations. As a result the process of procuring contractors was drawn out, much to everyone’s disappointment.

During development of the system opportunities arose to not only address the issues of consistency, timeliness, openness and simplicity but also to reward good health and safety management, sustainable practices and robust environmental management principles.

The procurement process SKM proposed was designed to cater for typical works contracts as part of Capacity’s CAPEX programme. Taking care to remove subjectivity, the system involved a series of assessment matrices to evaluate contractors’ non-price attributes, spanning six different categories of three waters construction. To ensure transparency all scoring and how it was derived would be stored in a central database.

Templates for assessment and feedback were developed to ensure the system was consistent and self updating. Contractors have to submit their attributes once upfront. Then subsequent tenders, they need only submit a price and methodology. Reducing their workload and allowing them to focus on a well thought out methodology and an informed price.