SESSION: Procurement and Contract Management

This page aims to collect important procurement related cases, contexts and literature, on which I rely frequently to build my knowledge in the domain.

The Indian Infrastructure Book of Knowledge (2022)

Compensation Method and Procurement Method

Public Procurement

L-1 The Niti Ayog has the following to say about the L1 bidding (https://niti.gov.in/verticals/project-appraisal-and-management-division) (Accessed 27th September 2023)

Government E-MarketPlace

Public Private Partnerships – A procurement perspective

Reverse Auction

Unsolicited Bids/ Swiss Challange

Procurement Manager

Background

Interestingly, in both academia and practice, the labels of procurement, sourcing, purchasing, contracting (and the like) have a signficant amount of ambiguity around them. Which are same and which are different, are only matters of high level perceptions. My own take, it is not worthwhile to get into this debate.

Alternatively, recognizing that organizations cannot do everything on their own, they need to get things (goods, products, services etc) from outside, and the process of that is procurement and managing them once provided access, is contract management. Though, for some procurement is about both purchasing and contract management. FULL STOP.

In my career with the railways and IIMI, I have been involved with all stages of the procurement process. Starting from specificiation generation for good and services (hardware, software, network, services for ERP installation at DLW Varanasirequired creating detailed specification of IT equipments, of which I had little background) , preparing tender documents (at DLW, Varanasi I remember working on the 35th version of the tender document; pest control of coaches; cleaning of coaches; transportation of bogies and wheels, to name a few); managed the tendering process and sat on tender commitee minutes (linen washing and mechanized laundry for Indian Railways; engineering tenders, etc); awarded works and signed contract agreements (consultancy agreements at IIM Indore); have managed contracts as the client (linen washing, coach cleaning, rolling huts etc) and delivered as part of contracts (consultancy projects for MP Government and Union Government). Besides, this I have been following infrastructure procurement, with my interest in PPPs, and would have skimmed over hundreds of procurement documents of highways, railway station, power supply, airports, etc. Further, I had also attended the Global Procurement Summit twice in person to build an idea of what the field is all about.

On the research side, I have a paper published on outsourcing of ITeS and BPO services, wherein we study capabilities of servcie providers (like Accenture, Infosys, Wipro, TCS, etc) for delivering Digital Transformation Outsourcing.

Procurement Manuals of different organizations

Standard Bidding Documents (few)

My views on procurement

Public Procurement – Make in India

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REFERENCES