PURCHASING PROCEDURES - University of Central Lancashire

4 TENDERING PROCEDURES
Tenders may be sought by one of four procedures: Open, Restricted, Negotiated or
Competitive Dialogue. Open and Restricted are by far the most commonly-used procedures.
4.1 Open Procedure
A notice is published in the OJEU stating that tenders will be sought under the Open
Procedure. All potential suppliers requesting tender documentation by the deadline stated in
the notice must be sent the documentation within 6 days of their request. Alternatively the
documentation can be made available to all interested suppliers on the internet. The
advantage of the Open Procedure over the Restricted Procedure is that minimum timescales
are shorter. However, if there are a large number of potential suppliers in the marketplace,
use of the Open Procedure can result in a large number of tender submissions, which in turn
increases the assessment workload. One way of attempting to control the number of tenders
is to stipulate minimum levels of economic and financial standing or technical/professional
ability in the contract notice. Care must be taken to ensure that the minimum levels are
related to and proportionate to the subject matter of the contract, and that the levels used do
not exclude smaller companies unreasonably.
4.2 Restricted Procedure
A notice is published in the OJEU stating that tenders will be sought under the Restricted
Procedure. Firms communicate, in response to the notice, their interest in tendering for the
contract. The contracting authority, using criteria stated in the notice (e.g. legality to
operate, financial and economic standing, and technical/professional ability) which must be
drawn from a list provided in the legislation, selects firms who will be invited to submit a
tender.
It is permitted to state the number of firms the contracting authority intends to invite to
tender, sometimes expressed as a range. This is the main advantage of the Restricted
Procedure over the Open Procedure, since it restricts the number of tenders and
consequently reduces the amount of effort required to evaluate them. The range must be
stated in the contract notice and in any event the minimum number permissible is 5. If the
number of eligible respondents falls below 5, the process may continue, providing there is
still genuine competition. However no “new” candidates can be introduced at this stage and
the selection criteria cannot be artificially relaxed to allow more firms to pass to the tender
submission stage.
The criteria stated in the notice cannot deviate from those set out in the legislation. Thus it
can often be very difficult to differentiate suppliers so that enough of them can be eliminated
at the first (often called the „prequalification‟) stage even after minimum levels of economic
and financial standing or technical/professional ability have been stipulated. Any exclusion
of a supplier at this point must be fully justifiable in terms of its failure to match the
selection criteria stated in the original contract notice.
If there is likely to be a large number of applications from interested firms, great care must
be taken to develop a prequalification questionnaire that has the desired effect of being able
to be used effectively and fairly to differentiate the firms‟ capabilities, so that only the
required number of firms passes through to the tendering stage.
Purchasing Procedures December 2011