CIDA Consultation on Procurement

On November 4, Ron Hewitt, member of CAIDC's board, attended a Consultation session on Procurement hosted by CIDA held in Gatineau. Attached is a copy of the slides used at the meeting to explain the proposal and elaborate on its implementation. Ron's comments below: My overall impression was a positive one about CIDA's sincerity in reforming the domestic procurement rules. Their objective is to dramatically shorten the procurement process. The day of the meeting was the day that the Auditor General's report had come out, so they were sensitive to her criticism of the lengthy process. The procurement process identified in this material is not the only change they are contemplating. They did indicate some willingness in the future to consider a two stage process of pre-qualification, and a move to quality from price (for example moving from the 80/20 technical/financial split). Much to the delight of the engineers in the room, they seemed to point to an increase in infrastructure projects in the future. A major change that was not clearly identified in the template is that Reimbursables will be part of the Financial Proposal in the future, not the Technical Proposal. While they will not be marked or go toward the assessment of the financial bid, they are being put there to stop a practice that CIDA found inappropriate. Apparently some bidders were including local consultants' costs in the Reimbursables and not in the fee calculation. By moving Reimbursables to the Financial section, this will be stopped. Should someone put these costs into Reimbursables, they will be moved into the fees section. This is a good change it seems to me and will ensure a level playing field. CIDA considered all of the points raised in my memorandum and the additional points raised by Richard, as well as some new points raised by other participants in the session. They indicated that there is a backlog of proposals in branches awaiting approval, which should come quickly now that country strategies had been approved. We encouraged them not to flood the consulting market with these proposals as our ability to deal with a too many of them would affect the quality of the proposals in reply. We also encouraged the re-establishment of the CIDA pipeline so that we can plan ahead for proposals. Until that happens, we suggested that a reasonable period of time be provided for responses to new proposals. CIDA indicated that they were not concerned that there would be a flood of proposals released at once, since all had to go through a vetting process and legal review. This was somewhat disconcerting, as it appeared that this would once again slow down the process. CIDA also indicated that they might be establishing a central procurement function to standardize process and procedures. While this would have the advantage of providing much needed standardization, we cautioned that it might slow down the process if the new area was not adequately resourced. CIDA encouraged people to provide any additional comments to Patrick Duponsel at Patrick.duponsel@acdi-cida.gc.ca .