Governments all over the world are increasingly using the Internet to conduct procurement with the private sector. E-tendering, e-purchasing, and e-reverse auctions are some of the new vocabulary in the context of electronic Government Procurement (e-GP), which contributes to economic development and increased transparency and efficiency of government procurement. In this workshop, held on May 12, 2004, World Bank staff and government officials from Mexico and Brazil shared their experiences in this field, discussing projects in Latin America, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and others.
Knut Leipold, a member of the Bank’s procurement policy and services group, gave background to e-GP and explained how it fit into the Bank’s strategic framework. E-GP, involves electronic means, mainly the Internet, to conduct government procurement. The physical barriers of space and time are broken down to promote transparency and efficiency. E-tendering is e-GP for specialized goods and services that are of high value and low volume, while e-purchasing is based on price and involves low value and high volume goods. Leipold detailed the benefits of e-GP, including transparency, reduced corruption, increased competition, lower transaction costs and prices, shorter procurement cycles, and improved quality of procurement management. The keys to the success of an e-GP system, he explained, are government leadership, policy and legal framework, human resources, technology, and institutional change.
Ing. Fadrique Gallegos Camacho, director of e-services operations for the Mexican Secretariat of Public Function, discussed Compranet, an e-procurement system designed to make the process of government purchases more transparent and efficient and to provide public information about the procurement process. Marcos Ozorio de Almeida, chief adviser to the Secretariat of Logistics and Information Technology in the Ministry of Planning, Management, and Budget in Brazil, explained the biggest challenges faced in his country — bridging the digital divide and integrating infrastructure, systems, and services between governments and within the government itself. To work toward solutions, specific working groups have been formed in eight areas: digital divide, online services and site management, systems integration, legacy systems and licenses, network infrastructure, governmental governance, relationship-free software, and knowledge and strategic information management.
Public sector management division specialist Ed Campos offered his perspective on the e-procurement system used in the Philippines. If you can structure an e-GP system in a way that improves transparency, accountability, and efficiency, he asserted, you can at least indirectly get at the problem of competition. He also praised Philippine law, which allows the government to adopt new technologies whenever they arise without requiring legislative approval. Alex Borges de Oliveira, of the Bank’s Latin America procurement team, described a joint pilot of the e-reverse auction in Brazil with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). A program study, to be financed by the Bank and the IDB, has caught the attention of the United Nations Development Programme, which has recently expressed interest in project. Bank applications of e-procurement systems are heavily based on cost, according to Rob Schware, lead information specialist for Global Information and Communication Technologies (GICT). In terms of Bank work, such systems can be inserted in different sectors. For example, an e-procurement system was considered for the Information Infrastructure Development Project in Indonesia but its cost was estimated at US$40-50 million, an amount too big to be supported by the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank. Eduardo Talero, a member of the World Bank’s Procurement Policy and Services group, offered comments based on his experiences in Chile, Mexico, India, Sri Lanka, and Colombia. Talero related e-procurement to a soccer game in which the teams and players stay the same, but the referees, rules, and stadiums all change. E-procurement should be integrated into strategy and training, he continued, and industry standards for best practices should be established.
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