Top five government tender awards this year

2021 opened with some interesting opportunities from the public sector and a fair number of tender awards to show that government procurement had not slowed down despite budgets being diverted to pay for personal protective equipment.

The services sector was the biggest winner this month, with the telecoms sector also taking two places in January's top tender awards.

On the downside, ITWeb notes the announcement of several tenders that deviated from advised public sector procurement processes as well as some announcements that lacked transparency.

Although not illegal, deviations to legislated and recommended procurement practices are rare and generally frowned upon. Regulations do, however, allow that in specific cases it may be “impractical to invite competitive bids”. A National Treasury issued guidance notes that a deviation may sometimes be warranted in urgent circumstances/emergency cases or where there is only a sole supplier of particular goods or services. Procurement deviations are required to be reported, and explained, to the Auditor-General and the relevant treasury.

The public sector started off 2021 with notices of five contracts that had been awarded outside of the tender process. The South African Weather Service announced that it had entered into a three-year contract with Microsoft for license renewals valued at R7.8 million.

The public sector started off 2021 with notices of five contracts that had been awarded outside of the tender process.

The remaining deviations came from the Education, Training and Development Practices SETA and amounted to R12.2 million. This included the procurement of a management information system from Solugrowth at a cost of R4.76 million; an extension of a contract with Ricoh SA for photocopier services for R1 million; extension of business continuity and disaster recovery services provided by Global Continuity at R874 000; and a R5.5 million contract extension with Internet Solutions for supply and maintenance of network services.

The last decade has seen a number of amendments made to public sector procurement processes. Transparency, in particular, has an important role to play in keeping government purchasing fair, wide-reaching, cost-effective, competitive, relevant and free of corruption. While South Africa undoubtedly still has far to go to achieve these ideals, improvements have been made in so far as the disclosure of tender values is concerned.

Although public procurement officers have been instructed that no bid may be advertised which has not been provided for in the budget, there are some circumstances where values may not always be applicable. This includes, among others, invitations to be part of a panel; expressions of interest to participate in a closed tender process; and goods and services to be provided on an 'as and when required' basis.

In an interesting departure from reporting norms, the Medical Research Council of South Africa opted not to disclose the value of its printing services tender in the National Tender Bulletin, or the names of the three suppliers that had been awarded contracts. In another announcement it revealed that Dimension Data had secured a tender for pro-active alerting, monitoring, reporting, managed services and procurement of storage related hardware. When it came to the value column however, the council stated “rate based”.

Interestingly, the South African Revenue Service also chose not to declare the cost of a tender awarded to Always On IT for the supply and delivery of laptops to Interfront.

Here are the top five tenders (by value) awarded in the first month of 2021:

Winner: EOH Mthombo

EOH Mthombo beat out Altron TMT to secure a R49.7 million tender with the National School of Government (NSG) for the provision of outsourced support services. The contract will run for five years.

In its tender documentation the organisation said its objective was to create a simplified, cost-effective and easy to manage ICT environment. Accordingly, the NSG decided to outsource the ICT support services relating to business applications, software, ICT infrastructure, computer hardware and communication networks (both local and wide area networks).

As part of the contract, EOH will be responsible for the service desk function, providing first through to third line technical support, in line with ITIL and other best practices. The company will also co-ordinate and manage all services provided by third parties, including the State IT Agency which manages the NSG's WAN infrastructure and connectivity. EOH is also expected to provide and implement security services across all levels of the ICT environment. Under infrastructure requirements, EOH has been placed in charge of server virtualisation and consolidation solutions, utilisation, capacity optimisation and cost reduction.

The NSG says it expects to be assisted in acceleration of business growth with recommendations of next-generation cost-effective capabilities and has specified a number of future projects that will be in EOH's hands to deploy.

Winner: Datacentrix

The national Department of Tourism has taken advantage of State IT Agency (SITA) transversal contract 1183 to acquire document and image management services from Datacentrix for a period of three years.

The contract, which spans a total of 65 specified services, became effective April 2014 and ran to the end of July 2017 before being extended several times. Since January 2019 the contract has been operating on a month to month basis until such time a replacement contract is in place.

While all public sector organisations are allowed to use the transversal tender, all government departments are compelled to make use of it in terms of the SITA regulation. For procurement above R500 000, departments are required to approach all service providers accredited for the required service. Nevertheless, of the 55 services providers approved for document and image management, the department received only one other bid from Faranani DocTec. It is not known whether the department invited all the accredited service providers to bid on the specifications.

In its service definitions for document and image management SITA says: “Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has become an integral part of the management of business units and departments, in support of business operations, to enable interfacing with external stakeholders and to ensure compliance to appropriate legislation.

“The acquisition of information sources into digital mediums and the indexing of such information for reference purpose has become a specialised field. The service will range from the initial consultancy on ECM strategy to the development thereof within a file plan inclusive of back-scanning with a managed workflow defined.”

Winner: QI Solutions

Qualitative Innovative Solutions (QI Solutions) has outbid 12 competitors to secure a R14.5 million contract to provide the Insurance Sector Education and Training Authority (INSETA) with an off-the-shelf enterprise resource planning system. The tender includes the provision of support and maintenance for five years.

The authority issued the request for proposals late last year as it wanted to replace its hosted Microsoft Dynamix AX 2012 solution. In its notice the organisation explained it wanted to outright purchase an off-the-shelf solution that required minimal customisation. The tender includes the migration of data from the existing system and verifying the “correctness and completeness” of the data for audit purposes; as well as ensuring interoperability with INSETA’s management information system and other technologies.

Formed in 2015, QI Solutions is a 100% young, black female owned company. Its offerings include custom software development, staff augmentation, SaaS app development, cloud software development, project management, business analysis and business architecture.

Winner: Vox Telecoms

Vox Telecommunications has been selected to provide the Local Government Sector Education and Training Authority with wide area network (WAN) services for a period of five years.

The contract is inclusive of a secure, cost-effective and highly available MPLS network and Internet services covering all LGSETA offices throughout South Africa. The services will also include a hosted managed firewall, an Internet breakout link, domain name services and a demilitarised zone for future host connectivity. The authority also specified that the infrastructure should be scalable with a view of delivering on future services that will reduce costs such as software-defined WAN.

LGSETA currently has eight provincial offices connected to its head office as well as three satellite offices which do not but may require connection in the future.

Winner: Telkom

Sticking with telecommunication requirements, the Public Protector has appointed Telkom to provide holistic mobile communication services for its employees for three years, at a cost of just under R6 million.

Until 2019, the PPSA offered two options in its policy for the provision of cellular and Internet data services to its employees. As a result, the organisation has 210 employees that are receiving cellular and Internet data allowances, while eight individual contracts have been entered into with Vodacom for its leadership committee members and VIP protectors.

Following the review and approval of a new cell phone policy, the PPSA has amended its options to provision of individual contracts, as well as a bundled contract for voice, SMS and Internet data which will be shared among its employees.

In addition to voice and data services, Telkom is expected to provide devices such as smartphones, tablets and WiFi routers; a spend manager for visibility on account spending; and a closed user group.