Electronic Tendering

Practice Note

This Practice Note is a product of the Construction Industry Leadership Forum. It provides a principle-based strategy with options that are available to procuring agencies in response to the identified challenge. This Practice Note does not represent government policy and should always be read in conjunction with applicable government policy and the procurement rules of the relevant jurisdiction.

Current Challenge:

Whilst electronic procurement is widely used in the Australian construction industry, there remain opportunities for significant advances in this field, including through alignment and standardisation of approaches and requirements, full implementation of end-to-end electronic procurement and development of appropriate systems and software to achieve these goals.

Principle:

Major infrastructure construction projects will adopt full electronic end to end procurement except in cases where this would be inappropriate following a cost benefit analysis.

Options:

Set out below are options available to address the principle as applicable to the particular circumstances.

Practice:

• Adopt practices which commit the tender process to full electronic procurement.
• Adopt measured application of e-tendering practice to minimise non-critical / background information being issued during procurements.
• Adopt ‘real-time’ information systems for standardised contractor information typically submitted with each procurement, e.g. financial strength, safety performance / accreditation, code of conduct compliance, etc. to reduce the burden of tendering requirements in respect of this routinely provided company information.