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ACTIVITIES :: eTen :: Projects :: Projects of the Month :: SETS

September 2005 Project of the Month: SETS

Single European e-Tendering Service

Issues being addressed

Public e-procurement is a key area for development in the European Union. The target set in the Commission's Communication on Public Procurement of March 1998 is that 25% of all public procurement is to be handled electronically by the year 2003. Irrespectively of the precise accuracy of this forecast, it is clear that e-procurement remains a topic of interest EU wide. The procurement processes carried out by the European Public Administrations are usually very complex due to National and European legal requirements and due to the complexity of the goods and services to be acquired. Effective support of this process cannot be limited to the services commonly supported by e-marketplaces: the emphasis is not just on negotiating better commercial- conditions, but in optimising time and effort of the preparation phase in which the tendering departments are required to produce documentation, give support to the purchaser, organize the resources. This phase needs appropriate tools to organize the documentation to produce, to search and retrieve data from previous similar tenders, to create templates, to keep track of new tenders, to re-use documentation and to manage the internal workflow between public officials. A competition analysis carried out during the initial phases of the Project, showed that most of the competitive solutions currently available on the market are generic e-procurement applications focused on the bidding and offer evaluation phases, or on the supply chain that best fit industrial enterprises rather than government entities, or e-procurement portals that address general basic needs of business organisations, irrespectively of type or domain application. It is clear that such solutions do not fit the specific Public Administrations’ needs and operational environment.

Objectives of the project

SETS is a solution specifically designed for Public Administrations, featuring modalities specifically tailored for the needs of PAs in the European Union member countries. It addresses all key aspects of public procurement, ranging from call for tender preparation to evaluation and contract preparation while taking into account and complying with the latest legislation in force in the European Union. SETS, expressively designed for supporting the preparation aspects, the knowledge and information management, the planning phase and all the ‘back-office’ activity and taking in consideration the legal aspects, is positioned in a free area of the e-Tendering services for Public Administration. Its objective is to pilot and validate valuable results of the IST project E-NTRY (Electronic Tendering, Bidding and Negotiation Real-time System), which developed specific tools for Tendering and for Bidding organisations. SETS will test the suitability of E-NTRY in a new environment (public procurement) characterised by extreme complexity, high volumes and goods value, as well as pan-European participation and regulation.

 

The SETS system will be validated through two pilots installed in two different European Public Administrations (Province of Genova – Italy and Municipality of Grevena – Greece) to demonstrate that the SETS services may easily be disseminated to different EU countries, characterized not only by different languages, but also by different education and cultural background.

The Consortium

The SETS consortium consists of 5 partners:

Expected benefits

The expected benefits for European Public Administrations from the adoption of the SETS system are the following:

• Reduction of process duration, through the supports of effective knowledge management and document preparation, optimization of time planning and collaborative activities.
• Improvement in the quality of the process, through a service for the formal definition of the processes, that makes responsibilities, activity durations, document access policies explicit and checked by the system and also supports the responsible in the allocation of resources and in the continuous monitoring of the process
• Quality of produced documentation: SETS knowledge management supports the use of templates, validation of information sources and re-use of knowledge
• Reduction of communications by traditional means (phone, paper mails, paper documents)
• Economic Operators support in the documentation retrieval and dispatch to the responsible person of requests of clarifications
• Monitoring of process progress and document status: SETS architecture addresses transparency requirements by citizens.

 

Achievements

• The Project web-site is available since the begining of the project, to provide documentation relevant for the work of the various project teams and for the dissemination of the project.
• Technical partners have established a fruitful cooperation with the end users for the understanding of the public procurement process and of the legal and cultural constraints and barriers;
• The business processes carried out by the two administrations have been reengineered, by adopting the functionalities provided by the SETS system;
• In February 2005 the integrated software system was released and the customisation of the two pilots started. In June 2005 the two pilots have been completed and installed. The validation activity started immediately thereafter, based on the Evaluation Plan established by the consortium. Both the internal validation (performed by the users of the two pilots) and the external validation (performed by administrations and other stakeholders that will be involved by the end-users and/or contacted through the web site or as part of the dissemination activities) are in progress.
• A preliminary Market survey has been conducted and a Business Plan has been drafted and is currently being further refined.
• Self-running demos of the system as well as other promotional and informative material are available on the web site.
• The system has been presented at international events (more information are available in the events section of the web site); additional dissemination activities are planned for the near future (SETS will be presented and demonstrated at eChallenges e2005 conference and exhibition , in Ljubljana, Slovenia (October 2005) and at the POLIS exhibition of Greek Public Administrations in Thessaloniki, Greece (November 2005).

Reference Data

http://www.sets-procurement.org
Contract Type: Market Validation
Start Date: August 2004
End Date: February 2006
Duration: 19 months

 

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