Workshop for innovation procurement in public construction Report.
By: Rudolf Vohnout, Radek Velc
When: 14th Nov 2017
Where: City Hall, Prague, Czech Republic
The most active organization in public procurement procedures-related actions domain conducted a workshop in Prague on 14th of November.
The presentations might be seen on:
http://eafip.eu/events/workshops/construction-workshop/
The event itself could be (seen from the perspective of an attendee) divided into two parts:
- General information about public procurement.
This covers presentations about PCP and PPI from general (and already well known) perspective. Personally, what I see as the most valuable was going through the funding opportunities of the upcoming period (2018-2020) of Horizon 2020 in PCP/PPI domain.
It is also worth to mention that for several times have been emphasized (and asked by the audience) that PCP actions are excluded from the EC Public Procurement regulations. On the other hand PPI actions have to be conducted under the regulations.
Also, Most Economically Advantageous Tender (MEAT) criteria should be applied to Public Procurement evaluation. Value engineering approach should be considered as well.
- Concrete Use Cases and Best Practices, mainly from PCP domain.
Several use cases has been present. One of the most interesting and inspiring was the QUACO use case. This was a CERN PCP action to R&D new type of magnet to be used in the upgraded version of the accelerator. However interesting it was, CERN and the Large Hadron Collider with its upgrades is a very special use case. Individual regulations just for this case had to be approved to enable realization of such specific procurement procedures.
The other use cases followed the general procurement pattern but emphasize several points not to be underestimated. This includes:
- As a part of Open Market Consultation not forget to create collaboration.
- On PCP you cannot negotiate on technical level (only prior – part of Market Consultation).
- Before moving to the next PCP Phase, the best practice says to organise a PCP conference to address all (potential) supplier questions (related to the tender).
- PCP, or in other words R&D Procurement is always a shared risk deal (Procurer and Contractor).
- Criteria of Phase 2 should include a regulation of (maximum) price deviation from Phase 1. An example was up to 20% of the price (estimated for the solution) of Phase 1.
- All potential suppliers should provide schedule. If not, they could be potentially considered as untrustworthy – simply because they do not know the timeframe and sequence of the steps to be done.
- Evaluation should be done in at least 4 steps where the final is always the price. The sequence number of the final evaluation criteria should not be changed.
- Draft version of the tender documents to be send to the contractors in advance to get their feedback (especially regarding to some general errors).
- Bi-month meetings with contactors led by (procurer’s) supervisor to follow-up development progress.
A very discussion stimulation topic was if a PCP could be done considering regulations (laws and acts) and standards (technological) – because such things created boundaries for innovation which is undesirable.
The workshop provided an opportunity to get in touch with other participants (public procurers, yet contractors as well) and share valuable discussions within the specific issues.
To share the knowledge with PCP/PPI across various fields of industry/public procurers was the issue workshop was focused on, and it clearly hit the target.
The event itself was a great place for networking, even though the number of participants was not that high.