Are we falling out of love with the PQQ?

Are you someone who can’t live without two stages?  Do you quake in you boots at the thought of having too many tenders to score?  Are you like my colleagues in works; do you love a good old PQQ?

Well thanks to the EU procurement directive, Scottish Construction Review and improving public procurement practice, the Pre Qualification Questionnaire is in danger of falling into misuse in Scotland.  But will the PQQ really end up like a great pair of 1970s flared jeans?  Something which we put to the back of the wardrobe only to bring out again when they come right back into fashion.

Before you take your PQQ to the charity shop of procurement history, here are a few reasons why it might be just the procurement tool you’ve been looking for.

Don’t bin the PQQ just yet

So you’ve done your supply market analysis and you may even have published a future contract opportunity or a prior information notice.  All the intelligence you’ve gathered tells you that the tenders you should receive will be many and plentiful.

While you may be tempted to jump straight into the Invitation to Tender, a well thought out PQQ can benefit both your Client service and potential Suppliers:

1. Reduces the amount of evaluation work required by the Client
2. Sorts the ‘Great’ suppliers from the ‘Good’
3. Allows Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to apply and only spend valuable time and resources on a full-blown tender if they qualify and are really in with a chance of winning
4. Speeds up the tendering process
5. Allows a logical and defendable evaluation to be made.

Using a PQQ is the obvious answer to make sure the more detailed Price : Quality evaluation work at the second stage doesn’t take your Panel all year to complete.  Believe me, the Panel will thank you for this.

Sometimes a just asking a straightforward pass/fail qualification question doesn’t give you the detail you need to differentiate the great suppliers from the good.  A PQQ with some scored questions could be just the tool to use when you need a more sophisticated evaluation process.

SMEs don’t have the resources of larger companies.  For them preparing a tender will take resources away from their ‘day to day’ work, costing them both time and money.

It is much fairer to only ask them to do this if they genuinely have an opportunity to win the tender, and a PQQ will enable this.  Not only that, done correctly, the PQQ can demonstrate to the SME exactly what the Client is expecting (and so may deter SMEs who just can’t deliver).

While the PQQ is an extra-step on the ladder and may appear to increase the time taken between tender and award, in fact it can significantly speed things up.  By using the PQQ to decide who goes through to the tendering stage, it speeds up the Award process.  Not only that, but it spreads out the time and commitment from the Evaluation Panel, allowing them to schedule their contribution over a period of weeks and avoid the accusation that this procurement thing is just a load of bureaucratic time-consuming red tape.

Finally the PQQ can be used to defend decisions taken at an early stage.  Suppliers are told at the start of the process that either they can or can’t tender.  So any challenges to the decision not to be allowed to tender are made before the contract award.  This should mean that, once the contract is awarded, there’s no issue with the qualification part of decision.

Although the mechanistic days of using a PQQ just because we’ve always done are over, let’s not put our procurement “flares” to the charity shop just yet.  By thinking about how to effectively use a two-stage process we can get the best outcome for our services and our suppliers.

Best of all we won’t have to contemplate life without our beloved PQQ.