Press releases & news

Love me Tender!

2006-02-13 Source: Construction Computing

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It is immensely encouraging to find an application that must have, previously, wasted many man-hours of work, occupied large contingents of postal workers, and consumed large quantities of trees, finding its true home on the Internet. If ever a time-consuming job deserved to be hoisted into the twenty-first century, taking advantage of immediate electronic access and the latest secure communication systems it's surely the task of sending out and replying to tenders.

Tender administrators are now able to compile detailed electronic tenders, and issue them automatically to prospective suppliers, and to receive completed tender submissions by the same means in a secure manner, as sealed bids, into an online safe deposit box, and by a specified close date. The systems use the same banking level security to encrypt information which is posted and downloaded from the web.

The software in question is eTenderer, developed by Sarcophagus, a company founded in 1997 that provides specialised online collaboration and information management technologies for the construction industry. A successful company, the first company of its type to achieve profitability, it is now one the country has most successful independent online collaboration service companies. Amongst its clients is Asda Wal-Mart, which has been using Sarcophagus' the-project.co.uk since 1998 to help it manage its new building projects, refurbishments and store roll-out programme - a collaborative construction extranet portal that provides companies with an ability to share data centrally, and to manage the dissemination of global information about a project in real time. Project team members use the Internet to work more efficiently together and to cut down on the administrative overheads, and can turn around information and deliver projects more quickly and with improved quality control. Project extranets use automatic email notification of newly released information and drawings, with data accessible, instantly, from anywhere in the world.

eTenderer

Suppliers submissions are returned on-line, but as sealed bids, which can only be opened by a specified purchasing representative on the pre-determined tender opening date. This is the first time within the construction industry, incidentally, that suppliers tenders are published as sealed bids. The system has been designed to be easy to use, as well, allowing suppliers with no knowledge of on-line tendering systems to respond easily.

Security for the tenderer is one of the main considerations that Sarcophagus had in developing the system. Once a tender is submitted electronically the tenderer can be assured that its contents, including all supporting documentation and drawings, are not visible to anyone until the tender opening date. In addition to this, the fact that he has tendered is not available to anyone else, nor is he aware of other tendering firms.

The submissions, even after they have been classified as a sealed bid, are available to be amended, or updated, by the submitting company, right up to the tender opening date. The tender opening date can also be extended, if necessary, as well.

Tenderers may already be members of the-project.co.uk. Such membership, however, does not give them rights of access to a tender. Neither does tendering give access to normal project collaborative data, other than the documents within the tender package. Communication between the two parties is, however, established to facilitate management of the tendering process after the tender return date, which is controlled by a messaging system.

According to Graham Howarth, CEO of Sarcophagus, "eTenderer will reduce tender periods to days, rather than weeks, providing significant improvements to current construction working practices".

David Olivant, Commercial Procurement Manager for Asda Wal-Mart says "eTenderer.com supplied by Sarcophagus is easy to use, secure, reliable and efficient. It has enabled ASDA to broaden it is tender base not only to Europe but also ASIA without any technical or other issues. In terms of costs, it pays for itself with average savings of 20% on tender returns. It can be used for both one off tenders and term deals allowing the specifier to choose the best deal. It is intuitive and therefore requires no training for the tenderer from the specifier - they just log on and submit. The specifier can then review the log-ons of the tenderers and see where there is an issue - for example if no one has signed on - they can be contacted and asked why - thus saving time and gaining maximum submissions. All in all a great tool to support their collaboration software as well."

Besides Asda Wal-Mart, which already uses eTenderer alongside the-project.co.uk, Sarcophagus has released the software to Audi/VW. Timo Partanen, of SDA, who was project manager for several of the company projects, was impressed with the security aspects of the system as much as with its time saving qualities -The system should help prevent insider dealings and fraudulent submissions, and significantly reduce construction tender programmes in the long term.

On-line tendering will, obviously revolutionise the procurement business. It may also force contractual legislation to be reviewed and revamped to take advantage of a system that saves on project time, risk and costs.

MsgSave

The software, basically, provides more effective usage of Outlook, and allows users to create back-ups of emails, allowing them to organise emails into folders, save messages to CDR, DVD or other portable storage devices, collate important information and business emails from different recipients into network folders and transfer emails or email folders to other devices. It can also delete saved messages from email folders, and warn of duplicated saves, and messages that need to be posted back into Outlook are merely dragged and dropped into the Inbox.

MsgSave, which integrates easily within Outlook, appearing only as an additional icon on the toolbar, can save hours of work a week for any company that normally saves its emails, individually and manually. A 14 day fully functional trial of the software is available from the website: MsgSave - Outlook emails archiving tool.