Lawfulness
For a contracting authority it stands first that an invitation to tender goes lawfully. One wants no fuzz with delay, lawsuits and negative publicity. For a submitting SME it is essential that their efforts have result. It does not want to be put aside because of procedural errors or minor issues. These main points on both sides are also for Multum Interest for this reason the basis of the service.
This way it shouldn’t be done...
The fun part of tendering is that there is actually enough room for creativity within the above-mentioned legal boundaries. In fact a government organisation should be able to prevent that the tender procedure is limited to a desk exercise. It’s pitiful if only a few standard documents are modified for the situation and put at the internet. The risk of that is that the market doesn’t fully understand the question. The result might be that no or too few submissions are received. That has a negative impact on the functioning of the governmental institution. For a SME it’s frustrating when the specifications offer hardly any room for showing their added value because it is too rigid or shows a large lack of know-how.
Applying creativity
Creativity can be applied for example within the award criteria. At a large invitation to tender for waste disposal services the Dutch Ministry of Defence found it correctly very important that all waste streams were weighed. Because of this objectives could be formulated for a larger sustainability within the organisation using the principle of “measuring is knowing”. Problem was however that the market parties still were moving in the direction of being able to fulfil that demand. Because of the large number of Defence locations market parties needed to have a large number of freight carriages with measuring equipments. It was not certain whether they were able and willing to do this. For this reason the Ministry did not decide to formulate weighing as a requirement but as a wish. The result was that more participants than expected turned out to be capable of weighing all waste variants. By means of creativity in the invitation to tender process a sustainable result was this way achieved that moreover was a stimulant for innovation in the market.