Vietnam Deploys Online Tendering

The Vietnamese Ministry of Planning and Investment recently coordinated with the Korea Public Procurement Service (PPS) and the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) to organise a conference on government procurement tendering in a bid to strengthen cooperation and exchange experience in government procurement, including online bidding and partner-seeking.

 

The Ministry of Planning and Investment said the wide-scaled deployment of electronic bidding will open up a momentous turning point in the process of modernising tender activities and preventing corruption in public procurement.

 

In addition, online bidding helps Vietnam reduce costs, lower prices and approach modern public procurements in the world. Currently, online bidding is limited to small construction packages in Vietnam.

 

In the world, online tendering has become an inevitable trend. According to reports by implementing nations, online bidding reduces expenses by 3-20 percent of procurement value, or an average of 10 percent.

 

In Vietnam, the value of bids carried out in accordance with the Law on Tendering equals to 20 percent of the country’s GDP, or over US$20 billion. If we can put all bids online, we can save billions of US dollars.

 

Mr Le Van Tang, Director of the Department of Tendering Management under the Ministry of Planning and Investment, said the department has formed close and effective cooperation with PPS to build and management government procurement system in general and electronic government procurement (e-GP) system in particular in Vietnam.

 

In 2009, the Ministry of Planning and Investment built the online government procurement website http://muasamcong.mpi.gov.vn/ with the support of the South Korean Government which was represented by the Korea International Cooperation Agency KOICA).

 

The E-Procurement Pilot System (EPPS) project built by South Korea consists of four components: online bidding, online procurement, online contract signing, and online payment. To date, Vietnam has successfully piloted the first component, online bidding. After three years of experiment, the country has successfully concluded more than 60 electronic bids in all three fields: procurement, construction and consulting services.

 

Mr Nguyen Son, Deputy Director of Tendering Management Department, said: Although online bidding is very convenient, different technologies and infrastructures and limited connectivity of joining parties put a brake on the proliferation of electronic bidding.

 

To address above problems, the Tendering Management Department reported pilot results to the Prime Minister. The Government agreed on building training programmes and raising public awareness of online government procurement, building and completing electronic bidding system under the public private partnership (PPP) model.

 

In early April 2012, the department will choose suitable consulting units for completing the feasibility study report on PPP model-based project and selecting investors.