TALKING
‘‘ business
We ’ ve seen many a manual task go the way of the dodo in favor of a digital alternative in the past 30 years . From the film in a camera becoming a memory card to the development of e-Tags to replace the toll booth , not much of what we did in the 1900s remains the same in 2020 . office misplacing the entire file or delivering it too late – effectively rendering the tender chances for that vendor null and void .
Your postie took a wrong turn ? Well , better luck next time .
Daniel Benad , Regional GM , Australia and New Zealand , Rimini Street
The procurement process was one of the last holdouts of its era and , many would argue , one of the reasons behind the perception of the ‘ speed of government ’ being slow compared to the rate of innovation within the private sector .
It was an all-consuming process , one which significantly slowed innovation . Governments keen to provide taxpayers with upgraded services were unable to keep pace with innovation at the same rate as the private sector could .
While the concept of procurement is valuable , particularly as a means for government agencies of all sizes to ensure transparency and probity , for a long time it was a manual process prone to red tape , delays , human error and an over-reliance on paper documents .
But the process underwent an overhaul , one which has rendered many of those archaic paper-driven processes from a century gone by as obsolete .
How archaic was it ?
But that all began to change slowly within the past few decades .
In recent years in Australia and New Zealand , there ’ s been a noticeable transformation that has further shortened the process .
The average process for a vendor looking to respond to a request for tender was to physically find an advertisement in a newspaper ; write to the government agency or call , requesting the documents ; receiving the documents ; filling them out and re-submitting prior to the deadline , all with physical documentation – no . pdfs or . docx files , but reams of paper .
This could take weeks , from end to end , and was prone to human error ; a box not ticked here or a date unclearly written there could prove the difference in success or failure .
Further , procurement officers were often at the whim of things clearly out of their control , such as the post
While a requirement for government remained to advertise open tenders in metropolitan newspapers , organizations such as TenderLink and others would compile them , digitize them and send them to subscribers . Soon afterwards , open tenders could be found online at the likes of Austenders and state-based equivalents . Then , tender documents could at last be downloaded from a government agency and uploaded online instead of being sent by post .
And in recent years in Australia and New Zealand , there ’ s been a noticeable transformation that has further shortened the process from weeks down to days , and has governments close to being on pace with the private sector .
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