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Targeted consultation on eForms - the next generation of public procurement standard forms

22 November 2016

(From ec.europa.eu)

The purpose of this consultation is to receive feedback on eForms - a major update to the public procurement standard forms aimed at significantly improving data on procurement in the EU.

The goals of eForms include improving competition for public contracts and public procurement governance, simplifying the use of procurement notices, and ensuring synergies with similar ongoing procurement data-related projects, specifically the Open Contracting Partnership’s Open Contracting Data Standard and the work of the European Committee for Standardisation.

Targeted stakeholders

We welcome comments from a wide variety of stakeholders:

  • companies interested in winning public contracts, public bodies conducting public procurement, academics, and NGOs working in public procurement, as well as their associations.
  • government authorities working on procurement policy, especially in the use of procurement data, including national representatives in the European Commission’s working groups on public procurement.
  • Tenders Electronic Daily eSenders and all others active in the electronic procurement sector.
  • other interested parties.

Content

We ask you to comment on one or both of the following documents:

  • the explanatory note. This document highlights the most important proposed changes to the current standard forms and also includes specific questions. This is the main consultation document.
  • the technical specifications spreadsheet. This file is highly technical and likely to be interesting to only some stakeholders. These specifications contain all the standard forms in one table, together with technical information. To make reading the technical specifications easier, we have prepared a cheat-sheet. As an alternative to the technical specifications spreadsheet, we have also created illustrative visualisations of the technical specifications. These display the most important information in a similar way to the previous version of the forms. For non-technical readers, these are easier to read and comment on than the technical specifications spreadsheet.
  • .

How to respond

Please send comments on one or both of the two documents using the eForms comment spreadsheet. Please send this spreadsheet with your surname in the file name ("eForms_comment_sheet_(your_surname)" to GROW-G4@ec.europa.eu before the deadline of 16 January 2017.

Additional information

Please note that public procurement is a complex and multidisciplinary field. Accordingly, the eForms draft is being prepared by a multidisciplinary team consisting of lawyers, data analysts, and IT specialists. In our experience, this complementarity of views is very beneficial and we recommend readers, if possible, to try working on eForms in teams which also include at least these three skillsets. 

Finally, we are planning to hold weekly group webinars to discuss and explain topics of interest to participants. If you would like to join the webinar, please send a message to GROW-G4@ec.europa.eu (ideally indicating the subject you would like to discuss) and we will inform you about possible timeslots.

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