E-government procurement: myriad opportunities

There are strong reasons why enterprises should join e-government procurement today

In comparison to paper-based procurement, e-GP through the Vietnam National E–Procurement System (VNEPS) brings many benefits to bidders, including: unlimited business opportunities, convenience and ease of use, fairness and transparency, as well as saving costs, time, and human resources.

Unlimited business opportunities, especially with publicly-funded projects

Through VNEPS, bidders have access to thousands of business opportunities from publicly-financed projects across the nation in all fields, ranging from the procurement of goods and civil works to consultancy and non-consultancy services. In 2017, VNEPS reported 8,100 e-procurement packages and 93,000 bidding invitations with the total value of VND9 trillion ($398 million). In the first six months of 2018, the number of e-procurement packages was 6,100, nearly double the 3,300 packages from the first half of last year. Some packages were valued up to VND194 billion ($8.6 million).

Convenience and ease of use

In order to provide the best services for procuring entities and enterprises, VNEPS is updated and upgraded instantly to suit the increasing demand of users. Particularly, a mobile application for e-GP, named Mua sắm công: Đấu thầu, is now available on both the iOS (https://goo.gl/ojRybP) and Android (https://goo.gl/RMSvT1) platforms.

Transparency and fairness

With VNEPS, every bidder has an equal opportunity to access information and participate in bidding. Bidders’ identity remains confidential and is only disclosed following a bid opening, which helps minimise collusion, which might occur in traditional procurement.

Saving resources: saving time, human resources, money

As all steps from searching for information to submitting bids are conducted online, bidders can save a lot of costs, for instance on acquiring bidding documents, printing bids, delivery, as well as saving time and human resources to prepare and submit bids.

A global trend

Having been successfully applied in many countries all over the world, e-GP has proven to be an inevitable trend in the 4.0 era. The Vietnamese government, therefore, set the roadmap to accelerate the application of VNEPS nationwide: by 2025, 100 per cent of procurement information will be public on the system and 100 per cent of government operational procurement activities and 70 per cent of public procurement governed by the law on procurement will be conducted online.