The City’s e-Procurement portal which went live on 1 November 2017 will make the process for suppliers to bid for smaller contracts simpler and faster.
The City of Cape Town is putting its money where its mouth is by cutting the red tape associated with bidding for smaller contracts. Suppliers who would like to transact with the City can now do so online.
The e-Procurement portal currently caters for contracts with a value up to R200 000 for specific commodities such as clothing and hardware. It affords suppliers the opportunity to apply for multiple contracts, track the progress of their applications, and receive notification if their bid is successful.
‘This is a step in the right direction to reduce the cost of doing business with the City. Red tape and caches of paper often characterise government operations. The use of this online platform will ultimately eliminate the costs associated with hand-delivering bid applications as well as printing and binding costs in the future. As a well-run city, we continually look at improving our processes to create an enabling and seamless environment for our suppliers. The e-Procurement portal is a tangible example of our efforts to simplify the bid application process for smaller contracts,’ said the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Finance, Councillor Johan van der Merwe.
In preparation for the roll-out of the portal, over 200 suppliers have been trained to use the online platform in the last month.
The City procures items from a list of over 80 commodities and has approximately 5 200 active registered suppliers. Over the next 24 months, the e-Procurement platform will be incrementally rolled out for all commodities and services. In order to ensure that suppliers and service providers are well equipped to make use of this technology, further training and engagement sessions will be hosted.
Down the line, in the next phase, further automation will be enabled for the request for quotations, tracking of purchase orders, and uploading of invoices. Built-in audit trails with automated compliance checks will improve good governance of the procurement system in the future.
‘This is a multi-year project, with the list of commodities going live incrementally up until September 2019, accompanied by training for the relevant suppliers. We committed, as part of the City’s Organisational Development and Transformation Plan, to build an organisation that promotes goods, services and processes that are more resource-efficient. We urge all suppliers who bid for the smaller contracts of up to R200 000 to make use of this opportunity as paper will become a thing of the past when bidding for City work in the future,’ added Councillor Van der Merwe.