Suppliers that would like to transact with the City of Cape Town can now do so online, following the introduction of an e-procurement portal.
According to the city, the portal caters for contracts with a value up to R200 000 for specific commodities, such as clothing and hardware.
It allows suppliers to apply for multiple contracts, track the progress of their applications, and receive notification if their bid is successful, it states.
"This is a step in the right direction to reduce the cost of doing business with the city," says the city's mayoral committee member for finance, Johan van der Merwe.
"Red tape and caches of paper often characterise government operations. The use of this online platform will ultimately eliminate the costs associated with hand-delivering bid applications as well as printing and binding costs in the future.
"As a well-run city, we continually look at improving our processes to create an enabling and seamless environment for our suppliers. The e-procurement portal is a tangible example of our efforts to simplify the bid application process for smaller contracts."
National government has committed to clamp down on duplication and fraud in the supply chain. As a result, the state is looking to implement an e-procurement system to achieve its objectives. However, implementation has been fragmented.
In 2015, National Treasury introduced its e-tender portal to serve as a single platform for the publication of tenders and eliminate fragmentation of notices for government tenders.
Meanwhile, the State IT Agency recently indicated it is accelerating its automation programme to deal with procurement frustrations. The agency has stated that an automated system will start with the issuing of tenders online, evaluation, adjudication and awarding of tenders, as well as contracts management.
Cape Town's city officials say in preparation for the rollout of the portal, over 200 suppliers were trained to use the online platform in the last month.
Over the next 24 months, the e-procurement platform will be rolled out for all commodities and services. In order to ensure suppliers and service providers are well equipped to make use of this technology, further training and engagement sessions will be hosted.
In the next phase, further automation will be enabled for the request for quotations, tracking of purchase orders, and uploading of invoices. Built-in audit trails with automated compliance checks will improve good governance of the procurement system in the future, reads the statement.
"This is a multi-year project, with the list of commodities going live incrementally up until September 2019, accompanied by training for the relevant suppliers. We committed, as part of the city's organisational development and transformation plan, to build an organisation that promotes goods, services and processes that are more resource-efficient. We urge all suppliers who bid for the smaller contracts of up to R200 000 to make use of this opportunity as paper will become a thing of the past when bidding for city work in the future," concludes Van der Merwe.
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