Case Study: Public Procurement System Register in Bulgaria

Activity Summary

Build a system to gather data from geographically dispersed governmental, municipal and private contracting authorities. Comply with recently enacted legislation designed to promote transparency in public procurement. Publish data on the web providing extensive search and notification facilities for business and the general public

Problem

In July 2004, Delera Systems was approached by Open Government Initiative Bulgaria - a project of DPK Consulting and USAID dedicated to strengthen the Bulgarian Government's capacity to prevent corruption, enhance transparency and accountability and promote rule of law.

The OGI Project seeked to assist the newly formed Public Procurement Agency with expert know-how and IT project funding. The PPA was looking to establish an infrastructure for gathering data for all public procurement in the country, and this infrastructure had to be operational in October 2004. The law also stipulated that all data be made available to the public through the Internet.

The project would have to be completed in two phases: development of an interim solution, which would collect and publish all necessary data for a 9-month period, and procurement of a large custom-built software system and associated hardware. The interim solution would need all core capabilities of the final software system and adhere to high standards of quality, and preserve all data for subsequent migration with little or no operator intervention.

Solution

A working group was formed with experts from the OGI, PPA, Ministry of Economy, and senior consultants from software solutions firm Eastisoft and Delera Systems.

Delera representatives participated in all stages of the process, but were chiefly responsible for establishing functional requirements for the software and hardware and for overseeing all technical aspects of the procurement procedure.

While requirements were gathered, Delera was tasked with the development of the interim system. In a record 2.5 months, the company put in place a solution allowing offline data entry in 14 different forms, some of which have as many as 60 interrelated fields with complex business logic. The solution included a number of Excel-based form templates, complex validation code built in C++ with COM, a C# / .NET application for operator data entry, a php-driven web site for publishing and an Oracle 9i database.

After initial rollout, Delera provided several improved versions of its interim solution, to ensure compliance with the data requirements of common EU legislation and the brand-new Bulgarian Public Procurement Law.

At the same time, Delera's senior consultant was actively involved in the process of establishing a procurement procedure (including appropriate legal documents), doing a two-phase vendor selection, extensive finalist interviews and proposal scoring. After vendors were selected for the production system software and hardware, Delera staff assisted OGI with technical issues during progress monitoring.

In May 2005, system vendor Rila Solutions delivered an integrated information system to the PPA on time and on budget. The system provides a host of features related to online entry, management and publishing of procurement documentation. The system is also fully integrated with Delera's offline entry solution, which will continue to be used in the foreseeable future.

Service Offerings

The following Delera Systems service offerings were applied to this project:

• Business Consulting: Determine what can be done to satisfy legislative and internal data processing requirements with very tight deadlines and under a limited budget
• Requirements Gathering: Perform extensive interviews with Agency personnel and study area best practices to arrive at a highly detailed Functional Specifications document
• Procurement Assistance: Establish process, form steering committee and execute an open public tender for the creation of custom software
• Software Outsourcing: Using RAD techniques and cutting edge technologies, develop an interim system to serve IT needs during the tendering and development of the production software
• Progress Management: Audit production software development throughout its entire lifecycle (including deployment) and assist with change management and acceptance

Key Benefits

• Solution developed by Delera was the core technological tool of the Agency in its first 10 months of operation, with a first stable version released to the public in a record 2.5 months
• By combining Excel documents with cutting-edge COM and .NET extension technology, the PPA was able to offer a quick and effortless data entry experience to geographically dispersed contracting authorities. Many of them have limited Internet connectivity and would not be able to use an exclusively online-based system.
• Delera custom software allowed the PPA to fulfill its mandated obligations with limited staff and very limited own IT budget
• The transparent and objective procurement process that was put in place produced software of the highest quality, considered to be one of the most successful IT projects of 2005. At the same time, project cost was optimized to a fraction of what a similar system would cost without strict requirements in place.

Technologies

• Microsoft Excel 2000 and later versions (including extensive use of VBA automation)
• COM/COM+ business logic and validation developed with Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 and ATL
• C#/.NET application for operator management, maintenance and forms data publishing
• PHP-based web site including full search functionality for published documents
• Oracle 9i used to house all data with extensive use of PL/SQL for update management