The Information Technology Authority (ITA) organized an Interactive Workshop for the National eTendering Project as part of the Authority’s ongoing eTransformation Plan. The main objective for the meet is to interact with government entities which are not yet part of the system, address their concerns and challenges, and take forward the implementation of the eTendering system in their respective ministries.
The workshop opened by a speech given by Eng. Yaqoob Dur Al Bulushi, Deputy CEO for Infrastructure and eServices, where he stressed the importance of change management and the fact that the mindset towards the digitalization and electronic systems is what matters and what is needed to kick off a comprehensive beneficial and electronic tendering system in the country. He also emphasized on the point that this project will change the conventional way of working at the government organizations in order to make the eTendering process simpler, faster and transparent for the concerned parties including government and participating companies.
The workshop, then, witnessed real success stories of government entities which were part of the new eTendering system and how this step changed the way process normally go. Experiences from Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs, Ministry of Housing, Sultan Qaboos University were shared and discussed. The representors of each entity highlighted the reduction of manual work and time saving in sale of tender documents, centralized company information, easy evaluation reports, reduction in file processing and mainly archived tender information available to anyone at 24/7. They also stressed the need for the eTendering system and the fact that it should evolve more in the coming years to provide more data analytics for better control and monitoring of tenders and spend management for the Government.
It is worth mentioning that 10 government entities are successfully using the eTendering system for their internal tenders on day to day basis with more than 100 tenders floated within 6 months since the inception of the system. Currently, there are more than 300 successful online tender document sales happened so far in the eTendering system.
