Department under which the project was taken: Industry & Mines Department, Government of Gujarat

Project Vision & Objectives:

One of the prime objectives of the Government is to secure efficiency benefits from the e-enablement of business process. Purchasing is often the area where the greatest savings can be made within any organization. E-enabling Purchasing helps to achieve those savings sooner as well as bringing other benefits such as best practice processes and quality management information. eProcurement project initiated with the vision of achieving above stated goals.

Project stakeholders (internal and external)

Internal         : All the departments conducting e-Procurement

                      (Buyer Community)

External         : All the bidders / suppliers / vendors

                      (Business Community)

Project Description:

e-Procurement system introduced for all the purchases and procurements in all the Government departments, Nigams and Societies under the administrative control of the State Government and which are funded by Government. Roll out of e-Procurement carried out in a phase manner starting from few works / items for limited Departments to multiple items for many departments.

e-Procurement is Online bidding system  wherein the physical tendering activity is carried out online using the Internet and associated technologies. This system enables the user to introduce ease and efficiency without compromising the required procedures of the department and also provides transparency, results in savings of time and money, shortening of procurement cycle, ease of operation to the implementing department and to the bidders / suppliers / vendors.

Through www.nprocure.com portal any organization can avail of e-procurement services. The portal is enabled with end to end e-procurement software. The portal can handle all the activities from the notice inviting tender to the publishing of the complete tender in the electronic form to corrigendum to filing, encryption for security, and digital signing of online tenders, to multistage evaluation and final conclusions. The portal can handle multi currency situations, multistage evaluations, reverse and forward auctions, catalogue management and so on. 

Features of e-Procurement:

• Government officials (Users) registration and Right Allocation
•  Vendor registration & Pre Qualification
• Indent creation and approval
• Estimated Cost Value (ECV)
• Tender Document management
• Tender Creation and approval
• Tender Publishing
• Tender promotion via e-mail alerts
• Issue of Corrigendum
• Online / Offline Sale of Tender Schedule
• Conduction of online Pre Bid meeting
• Online bid Submission by vendors (Facility for 2 bid / multiple bid system)
• Online Automated Bid Comparatives (Technical and Commercial)
• Online negotiations
• Award of LOI
• Reverse Auction / Forward Auction
• Rate contract management
• Purchase statistics
• Site Access Reports / Web Statistics

Technology Architecture:

                                 

The project has been built on 3-tier architecture. There's a presentation tier, which provide the front end for the site. There's a business logic tier, which handles several tasks including authentication, authorization and workflow management.  Lastly there is a database tier, which is used to read and write the data from its database.

The business logic has been kept separate from the presentation logic by design. This makes the system more scalable allowing new departments to be incorporated into the system. All workflow and navigation code has been abstracted from the user interface for achieving this. Being an online system where users are logging in, getting authenticated and filing tenders the system needs to have proper security. For this, two-factor authentication, digital signatures and 128-bit SSL encryption have been incorporated.

e-Procurement System introduced for the following transactions:-

• For purchases and procurement of goods, plants, equipments, machinery, medicines, medical and surgical suppliers and stores items, all type of store items, supplies and purchases, food and civil supplies stores items and purchases, printing and stationary items and purchase, all type of vehicles purchases, furniture an fixtures etc.

• All type of civil construction and related works etc.

• Outsourcing of required services etc.

• Auctioning of old plants, equipments, machinery, buildings, vehicles, furniture and fixtures, lands, properties etc.

• All other purchases and work orders.

Specific achievements during the year 2008-09

• During the year eProcurement was identified as a significant administrative reforms project and accordingly its progress was orchestrated throughout the year by significant training and educations programs, infrastructure improvements, awareness and creating business process reengineering.
• During the year no. of monthly tenders increased from an average of 800 tenders per month in the first quarter of year 2008-2009 to an average of 1359 tenders per month in March 2009.
• 400 numbers of training programs arranged.
• 20500 people (Buyers and Suppliers) participated in the program
• Total 12628 Tenders worth of Rs. 22788.58 Crores floated during the year.
• Total numbers of man days saving in tendering activity was 23.5 man-days multiplied by 12628 tenders = 2,96,758 man-days.

Status & Result:

• The project was initiated in the month of October 2004 and was made compulsory for all the government departments from January 2007. As on 1st December, 2010 over 168 departments/HOD's through their 898 offices are conducting online tendering and are prime stake holders of the project.

• More than 41505 electronic tenders worth Rs. 90,000 crores have been handled so far.

• Current rate is about 1200 tenders a month.

Period-wise Number of tenders and ECV (in Cr)

Awards

• Received CSI-Nihilent e-Governance Awards 2007 as Best e-Governance Project – G2B.
• Government Technology Award for ‘Connected Government Best Practice’ in October 2007
• National awards for e-Governance 2008-09 as ‘Exemplary Horizontal Transfer of ICT- Based Best Practice’ (Bronze medal) in January 2009