How we participated in public procurement
At the end of July, we noticed on the State Procurement website an interesting competition for our company to create and implement an automated content filtering system for the Ministry of Education with an initial price of 30 million rubles. Although it was immediately clear that the competition was initially sawing and honed under a single participant - the notorious creator of the SCF and PCF systems for schools, Megaversion, also known as NetPolice. Nevertheless, we decided to try our hand and participate in the competition.
And that's what happened in the end, I want to tell.
After downloading the tender documentation from the public procurement website, we began to study it. To begin with, we had a good laugh at the wording of the rationale for the relevance of the project:
')
The formation of a civilized personality, an internationalist patriot in modern conditions requires the search for innovative approaches to patriotic education, new technologies in the organization of such activities.
Art, including folk music, has great potential in this respect; by creating this, children with disabilities express their thoughts and can assert themselves.
The creators of the tender documentation did not seem to replace the information prepared for some other competition.
However, a couple of days later there was a change to the tender documentation, which already corrected the project’s goals to completely correct ones: “The urgent task is to create an automated content-filtering system for accessing the Internet, providing information and methodological support functions and monitoring the implementation of a uniform policy for the Ministry of Education and science of the Russian Federation, educational authorities and educational institutions to exclude access to Internet resources that are incompatible with the tasks of education and upbringing. "
In the meantime, we tried to deal with the conditions and forms of the tender documentation itself. Interesting were the criteria for evaluation and selection of the winner of the competition:
Once again, assessing our strength, we decided that the available developments would be quite enough to create a system in the shortest possible time, we made the final decision to participate in the competition and began to fill in the application forms.
If there were no problems with the first form with general information about the participant, then the second form “Detailed proposal on the quality of work” raised many questions.
First of all, for each work (by the way, everything is in the tender documentation, so it wasn’t necessary to think about them) it was necessary to write down all the actions of the performer, specify “Methods” and “Toolkit”. And here we got up. In general, from general considerations and common sense, it was clear what to write in these fields, but I wanted specifics. And it just was not. We could not find any examples of filling out an application on the Internet, requests for public procurement forums also did not give anything, all the familiar people involved in public procurement issues (both from the state and participants) were not aware of this specificity of the Ministry of Education. The result was brought by MoyKrug, finding people involved in public procurement in it and sending out a dozen requests for help, we received clear instructions from a couple of people with examples of filling in these fields.
Then it was easier and the rest of the forms we filled out quickly, we had only to sweat on the rationale why as a result of using the specified “Methods” and “Tools”, the quality of our work will improve.
As a result, all the forms were filled out, the necessary documents from the tax and the bank were received, powers of attorney and letters were written. Having fully formed an application, arguing hotly at last about the wording of the deadlines, having filed and filed an application properly, we sent our man to Moscow to send the application for the competition and attend the opening procedure for envelopes.
And then the surprises just started to begin. On the eve of the opening of the envelopes and when the person was already in Moscow on the contest page, suddenly there were explanations to the questions of another participant, in which the organizers found another mistake in their tender documentation and directly said, such as “technical error”. But as a result, our entire application would not automatically pass, since the error was in mandatory form and the slightest discrepancy to it led to automatic disqualification of the application.
I had to quickly prepare changes to the application and look for a way to put a seal on them in Moscow, while it was physically located in another city.
Having successfully passed and registered the application, our man came the next day to open the envelopes with the applications. The presence of a third participant, a representative from Entensys, also promoting its content filtering solutions, was an unexpected surprise for us and perhaps unpleasant for Netpolice.
As a result, all participants suggested of course the minimum possible time for the project.
And contract prices are as follows:
It was expected that there would be competition in qualification and quality criteria that were also fun - for example, just the number of methods and tools from the already specified form of quality justification, or the number of people with scientific publications on content filtering, or the number of contracts for content filtering for educational purposes.
However, the minutes of consideration of applications published late on August 30 came as a complete surprise for us - all participants except Netpolice were not allowed to participate in the competition. Accordingly, Netpolice as the only participant automatically became the winner.
In general, schools now have to wait for what Netpolice will offer them a new one, although judging by the lack of development of their main commercial product, schools will not have to expect any differences from the scolded SCF and the PCF.
However, for us this competition is not over. We are currently preparing a complaint to the federal anti-monopoly service for cancellation of the competition. As it turned out, Netpolice’s subsequent surveys over the past 6 years already had to create this system — at least the names and content of past contests, which Netpolice also single-handedly won by 99% identical to the content of this competition to create a new filtering system.
And that's what happened in the end, I want to tell.
After downloading the tender documentation from the public procurement website, we began to study it. To begin with, we had a good laugh at the wording of the rationale for the relevance of the project:
')
The formation of a civilized personality, an internationalist patriot in modern conditions requires the search for innovative approaches to patriotic education, new technologies in the organization of such activities.
Art, including folk music, has great potential in this respect; by creating this, children with disabilities express their thoughts and can assert themselves.
The creators of the tender documentation did not seem to replace the information prepared for some other competition.
However, a couple of days later there was a change to the tender documentation, which already corrected the project’s goals to completely correct ones: “The urgent task is to create an automated content-filtering system for accessing the Internet, providing information and methodological support functions and monitoring the implementation of a uniform policy for the Ministry of Education and science of the Russian Federation, educational authorities and educational institutions to exclude access to Internet resources that are incompatible with the tasks of education and upbringing. "
In the meantime, we tried to deal with the conditions and forms of the tender documentation itself. Interesting were the criteria for evaluation and selection of the winner of the competition:
- contract price with a weight in the final rating of 35%. At the same time, the maximum 100 points of the rating according to this criterion can be gained only if you do everything for free.
- quality of work and qualification of the participant with a weight of 20%. By the way, according to the law, this criterion cannot exceed these same 20%. About the content of this criterion is slightly lower.
- Deadlines for works with a weight of 45%. At the same time, the deadline for the implementation of the entire project should be from 63 to 85 calendar days, which is clearly not enough to create the specified system from scratch.
Once again, assessing our strength, we decided that the available developments would be quite enough to create a system in the shortest possible time, we made the final decision to participate in the competition and began to fill in the application forms.
If there were no problems with the first form with general information about the participant, then the second form “Detailed proposal on the quality of work” raised many questions.
First of all, for each work (by the way, everything is in the tender documentation, so it wasn’t necessary to think about them) it was necessary to write down all the actions of the performer, specify “Methods” and “Toolkit”. And here we got up. In general, from general considerations and common sense, it was clear what to write in these fields, but I wanted specifics. And it just was not. We could not find any examples of filling out an application on the Internet, requests for public procurement forums also did not give anything, all the familiar people involved in public procurement issues (both from the state and participants) were not aware of this specificity of the Ministry of Education. The result was brought by MoyKrug, finding people involved in public procurement in it and sending out a dozen requests for help, we received clear instructions from a couple of people with examples of filling in these fields.
Then it was easier and the rest of the forms we filled out quickly, we had only to sweat on the rationale why as a result of using the specified “Methods” and “Tools”, the quality of our work will improve.
As a result, all the forms were filled out, the necessary documents from the tax and the bank were received, powers of attorney and letters were written. Having fully formed an application, arguing hotly at last about the wording of the deadlines, having filed and filed an application properly, we sent our man to Moscow to send the application for the competition and attend the opening procedure for envelopes.
And then the surprises just started to begin. On the eve of the opening of the envelopes and when the person was already in Moscow on the contest page, suddenly there were explanations to the questions of another participant, in which the organizers found another mistake in their tender documentation and directly said, such as “technical error”. But as a result, our entire application would not automatically pass, since the error was in mandatory form and the slightest discrepancy to it led to automatic disqualification of the application.
I had to quickly prepare changes to the application and look for a way to put a seal on them in Moscow, while it was physically located in another city.
Having successfully passed and registered the application, our man came the next day to open the envelopes with the applications. The presence of a third participant, a representative from Entensys, also promoting its content filtering solutions, was an unexpected surprise for us and perhaps unpleasant for Netpolice.
As a result, all participants suggested of course the minimum possible time for the project.
And contract prices are as follows:
- The maximum price of 29.9 million, of course, offered Netpolice.
- We were the second with 14 million rubles.
- Entensys ranked first with a price of 10.9 million rubles.
It was expected that there would be competition in qualification and quality criteria that were also fun - for example, just the number of methods and tools from the already specified form of quality justification, or the number of people with scientific publications on content filtering, or the number of contracts for content filtering for educational purposes.
However, the minutes of consideration of applications published late on August 30 came as a complete surprise for us - all participants except Netpolice were not allowed to participate in the competition. Accordingly, Netpolice as the only participant automatically became the winner.
In general, schools now have to wait for what Netpolice will offer them a new one, although judging by the lack of development of their main commercial product, schools will not have to expect any differences from the scolded SCF and the PCF.
However, for us this competition is not over. We are currently preparing a complaint to the federal anti-monopoly service for cancellation of the competition. As it turned out, Netpolice’s subsequent surveys over the past 6 years already had to create this system — at least the names and content of past contests, which Netpolice also single-handedly won by 99% identical to the content of this competition to create a new filtering system.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/127507/
All Articles