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Advertising and Application to Tender
How Will You Let Suppliers Know There is a Requirement?
As a minimum, all University of Aberdeen tenders of £100k and over will have contract notices published on a public information service (Public Contracts Scotland) to ensure that they receive appropriate visibility and give potential suppliers access to our tender processes. It is also mandatory that all tenders over £156,442 are advertised in the supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union. Once the notices are in the public domain it is permitted to alert any firm you wish to be included (you may have noted their contact details at the "Research the Requirement" stage) to the details contained in the notices.
The Public Contracts (Scotland) Regulations prescribe the tendering procedures that we have to follow for tenders over £156k, and the most commonly used of these is the Restricted Procedure. This is described in detail below, and the general approach requiring suppliers to qualify to tender is one that may also be used as a "best practice" for below-threshold tenders.
The procedure is as follows:
4.1 Contact is to be made with Procurement and a meeting arranged to discuss the
procurement strategy and establish whether the tender might exceed the EU
Threshold of £156,442. If so, then information needs to be gathered to enable us
to place an advert/contract notice in the Official Journal of the European Union.
4.2 The information required for the advert:
- Title of the notice – this is a short statement of the goods and/or services
required. - A more detailed description is also required (usually just a few lines) to provide a general summary of what you wish to purchase.
- The place where the goods and/or services will be delivered/performed.
- Estimated value of the contract over the whole contract period excluding VAT (this should include whole-life costings such as post-warranty servicing etc).
- The required start date/delivery date.
- Period of contract – more relevant for services.
- Qualification Criteria (criteria for short-listing through to the next stage).
- Interested parties will be asked to provide some financial, economic, legal and technical information as standard (i.e. last 3 years audited accounts, details of their main business over the last 3 years etc). However, the client department may have additional requirements that will help them to select suitable firms to tender, e.g. the tenderer's approach to sustainability, or policies on diversity and equality, corporate responsibility and health and safety, experience of HE Sector, references, particular accreditations, membership of professional organisations etc..
The request for information is normally in the form of a Pre-qualification Questionnaire
(PQQ) which is made available electronically to interested firms. Procurement has a
standard template which they will modify to suit your particular area of interest.
4.3 Once this information has been provided to Procurement then an OJEU notice
will be placed. After publication all communications are to be formal, and via
Procurement. General details from internal meetings, the number of participants,
how the exercise is progressing etc. are all Commercially Confidential and not to
be shared with third parties.
The Restricted procedure is a two-stage process; suppliers apply to tender, then we
invite those we feel are qualified to submit tenders. The first stage is to request
applications to tender from interested suppliers along with any supporting information
such as audited accounts etc. We have to allow a period of at least thirty-seven
(37) days from the date the advert is placed for suppliers to provide their
qualification information. During this period, if the client department hasn't already
done so, then they should prepare a full specification of requirements. This has to go
out to the suppliers at the next stage of the process. (top)
