Consulting engineers must be involved from the start
Cost is usually the main factor in tender selection, which means the winning bid is not always the best
EFFECTIVE procurement of consulting engineer services needs to start right at the beginning so a project can benefit most from the skills being brought to bear.
Abe Thela, deputy president of Consulting Engineers SA (Cesa), says consulting engineers should be involved from the preconception stage of a project, where there is still greater flexibility to influence the project life cycle costs.
“Unfortunately, with current procurement practices the consulting engineering input is usually limited with regard to planning and fasttracked through the detailed design and implementation stages of projects with diminished ability to innovate and influence project life cycle costs,” says Thela.
Another limitation is that while functionality (quality) is taken into account as a minimum threshold in the procurement process, it is usually not a factor in the final bid assessment.
Therefore, price is often the main determining factor in final selection. This means that not only is the winning bid not necessarily the best, but bidders are unable to build in a margin to allow for a review of the planning and apply creative innovation that might result in more effective solutions.
“The procurement process needs to happen sooner and the criteria need to be modified to create a single assessment that includes preference, price and quality.
“We need to move from a situation where professional services are viewed as a commodity with a lopsided focus on price to a situation where people with technical and engineering skills play a key role in the procurement of professional engineering services,” says Thela.
He says quality plays a role in all projects, even in those that can be considered as routine; however, in large, complex mega projects, quality can be the key ingredient determining a successful outcome. Thela says aligned with the need to enhance the impact quality bidders have on outcomes is the need to build sufficient skills and resources into the evaluation process.
Over the years, the public sector has lost technical skills at an alarming rate and there is a dramatic need to reverse this process.
He says the government needs to make public sector positions more attractive for skilled professionals such as engineers so that it can build its internal capacity.
While going through this rebuilding process, the government can also bring in retired engineers to help mentor younger professionals and make use of private sector skills to supplement its own resources so it can speed up the delivery of good services across the country.
“There are current interventions, such as the municipal infrastructure support agent programme in which private sector engineers and other professionals will be deployed on a temporary basis to struggling local authorities.
“The objective is to help them build their internal capacity,” says Thela.
Peter Viljoen, chairman of Cesa’s marketing and communications committee, says employing consultants is a short-term solution.
“In the longer term the public service needs to attract and develop its own skills and capacity. The public service needs its own engineers running programmes and taking engineering decisions.”
Naren Bhojaram, president of Cesa, says that highly qualified personnel spend about 30% of their time preparing tenders, a worthwhile investment provided that the processes are fair and honest.
Another issue is the pre-selection process as too many firms tends to qualify, which means there are too many submitting tenders and individual firms’ success rates are often too low to justify the effort.
“Perhaps the time has come to introduce a new system. An approved supplier list can be created and for the more routine projects there can be a restricted number of pre-selection slots available each time and firms are allocated those slots on a rotation basis,” says Bhojaram.
He suggests that in larger, more complex projects the weeding out process needs to take place sooner so that only a relatively small number of qualified firms are actively engaged in developed detailed tenders.
Viljoen says that the tender process can also reward firms for excellence on projects completed in the past and, thus, provide incentives to deliver incremental improvements.