Considering Applications and List of Tenderers

How Do We Decide Who to Invite to Tender?

5.1     After the minimum 37 day period, Procurement should have received the applications and supporting information from the suppliers interested in participating.  A member of the Procurement team will open them and record the information provided against a checklist (for completeness of response) for each supplier.  A copy of the checklists and the applications will then be provided to the client department for consideration (the technical evaluation) and to identify which suppliers might be short-listed through to the next stage.

5.2      The client department should review the applications for details of experience and technical capacity, and if references have been requested then these should be followed up and the responses documented.  It is important to record which of the suppliers have been rejected and the reasoning behind this, and which will go forward to the next stage of the process. 

5.3      The applications, accompanied by a supporting narrative explaining the reasons for the decisions, should then be passed back to Procurement.  The public sector legislation currently in place facilitates supplier challenges to decisions made, even at this stage, so care has to be taken with the rejection process.  

5.4      Procurement will request that a University Accountant checks the short-listed suppliers' audited accounts to establish their financial stability (financial evaluation).  Each set of accounts will take approximately two hours for the accountant to review and report on, and their findings will be reported back to the Project Team before Invitations to Tender are issued to the selected suppliers. 

It's difficult to estimate how long this particular part of the process will take because it depends on the number of applications received, how many suppliers are short-listed and the availability of the client department, project team and the accountants to undertake this work.  However, we recommend that you allow around 2 to 3 weeks.