‘GeBiz’ is the Singapore Government’s e-procurement portal “where suppliers can conduct electronic commerce with the Singapore Government. All of the public sector's invitations for quotations and tenders (except for security-sensitive contracts) are posted on GeBIZ.
Suppliers can search for government procurement opportunities, retrieve relevant procurement documentations and submit their bids online.”
This system is underpinned by the following fundamental principles:
- Transparency
- Fair and Open Competition
- Value for Money
I have had more than 10 years’ experience using this portal, as a client in the past and now as a service provider. I will not delve into the user experience of GeBiz; rather, GeBiz has given me lots to think about in terms of how client organisations consider commercial relationships with service providers.
I run a business offering personal and corporate development activities and programmes. I am only too happy to state that GeBiz has indeed helped me find business opportunities efficiently and it works largely as designed.
GeBiz has been a boon for client organisations seeking products. Where services are concerned, GeBiz has arguably been less successful. This is something that many client organisations actually recognised, but this state of affairs will continue until an alternative or revision comes along.
Let’s say I work in a client organisation and was tasked to purchase desk calculators. I would list out the desired specifications (solar-powered, calculates to 10 digits, auto power-off function and so on) and I will wait for responses from potential providers. I study the responses, choose the lowest priced bid and wait for delivery of the calculators. If ever I needed more calculators, I would simply go through the same exercise.
I daresay that leadership development programmes, team-building activities or student enrichment workshops are not as easily reduced to a list of specifications.
Facilitation is a service, not a product - while it is possible to list out the desired learning outcomes, it is not possible to specify ‘how’ the facilitation should be conducted. On second thought, it might actually be possible, but the list of specifications could run to several pages!
It follows that, since it is so difficult to write specifications for a ‘good’ programme, the key arbiter would be price. Sadly, with services such as workshops or training sessions, we all too often get what we pay for.
Client organisations seem to favour ‘one-off’ engagements. This is especially true of schools. It is rare that a service provider is contracted by a school to conduct their annual camps for more than a year. It seems that schools don’t relish the thought of writing extensive documents to justify appointing one provider to run camps for 2-3 years, even if a provider has proved to do a good job. [I realise that this is not related to GeBiz as such, but this is an observable trend in the months leading up to school camp season.]
What happens then is that - particularly for school camps - the service provider resorts to hiring freelance or part-time staff to deliver the programme. The result is usually less than satisfactory, but since this is a one-off, there is no collective ownership between the client organisation and the service provider and hence no collective incentive to strive to improve. Worse, service providers face rising costs year after year, but school budgets don’t er, budge. What happens then? Corners are cut and everyone thanks their preferred deity that no one got hurt.
Another possible scenario is that a client organisation selects the lowest-priced bid, but pressures that provider to adopt some of the ideas or activities proposed by the unsuccessful providers.
Not to encourage this sort of thing, but a (very) small way the unsuccessful provider might get some redress for this is for the client organisation to offer all bidders a flat ‘programme design fee’ for the time and effort providers put in to put together their proposals - akin to what some government agencies (like CPF) do when procuring marketing or advertising services. The higher the ‘programme design fee’, the higher the expectation the client organisation can have when assessing the submitted proposals.
Longer-term contracts encourage service providers to think long-term and make more informed decisions about resource planning and management e.g. staff hiring/retention and training. The client organisation will be secure in the knowledge that the service provider is serious about delivering consistent performance and quality. The client organisation will also give the service provider actionable and constructive feedback with the expectation that the service provider acts upon it and improves delivery for the next event or project. This is something any service provider (airline, restaurant, hair salon etc.) knows and works hard at.
Longer-term engagements enable providers to act as 'consultants' to their clients. They can get to know the school or corporate culture and offer ideas or design programmes that are more closely aligned with the client organisation’s desired learning outcomes. Over the course of the engagement, the results can be tracked and are more valid. With single engagements, a service provider is more likely to just offer ‘off-the-shelf’ services - there is little incentive to offer improvements when there is no guarantee that the client organisation will select the same service provider the next time around.
Nicole Chua, a friend who works in the same industry as I, had this to say:
I feel that (GeBiz) must stay...because the procurement system in itself is not wrong. Rather, it is the mindset of ‘cost savings’ that needs to be changed. If the clients themselves are not well informed to be able to assess proposals, then an assessment mechanism should be in place to perform due diligence.All too often, client organisations go with what is administratively expedient - not selecting the lowest-priced bid requires a lot of paperwork to justify the decision.
Transparency is no bad thing - even as it allows competitors to know what is the winning bid, there is public knowledge of what the buyer paid.
I feel that there is a long way to go for civil servants to understand what it means to employ fair procurement practices thus obtaining the best possible combination of quality and value for money.
In the service industry, it seems illogical or at least counter-intuitive for clients to prefer the lowest-priced bids - ‘best’ and ‘cheapest’ rarely occur within the same sentence.
But in Singapore at least, we seem happy to settle for ‘cheap and (hopefully) good’.
Further recommended reading
Clarence Chua's post on 15 July 2017: https://www.facebook.com/clarence.chua.18/posts/10155543208117258
Letter to Straits Times, 10 Apr 2014 : http://www.asiaone.com/singapore/shed-light-policies-tender-process
5 Tricks Freelancers Didn’t Know About Government Procurement Via GeBIZ: https://workingwithgrace.wordpress.com/2017/08/17/5-tricks-freelancers-didnt-know-about-government-procurement-via-gebiz/
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