Freeing up Valuable Resources
Organisations often have their most experienced personnel engaged in the day-to-day development of procurement documents. This ties up these valuable resources in the challenges of a word processor, rather than the more important task of preparing a clear scope of work. Administrative personnel would be able to draft these documents very adequately if there are some controls put in place, to ensure that mistakes are kept to a minimum, and an oversight procedure can be put in place where the critical areas of documents are checked by senior members of the organisation.
Procurement is a Process
Procurement can be defined as a step-by-step process that follows a series of logical steps. South African National Standards and International Standards have been published that define how this process is put in place, and the Document Compiler takes full advantage of this. In South Africa, the Construction Industry Development Board has published the Standard for Uniformity in Construction Procurement, which is in essence, a recipe for how the construction industry has to conduct their procurement.
Rules and Permissions
The rules which permit changes or amendments to specific portions of the document are set up when the templates are captured. Possible rules relate to words within a clause, clauses, sections and even entire documents. The rules that are set up alongside the templates extend to mandatory, default include, and whether the entire clause is editable or just some words within the clause.
Historical note
The SABEeX Document Compiler is a legacy project that was developed from 2002 till 2009. This was a leap into the online service offerings that are common today, but were well ahead of their time.
The SABEeX Document Compiler was used very effectively by several of our clients to properly manage the use of organisational templates, and the procurement documentation that flowed from these. Once templates were captured and approved, our clients found the preparation of complex construction procurement documentation to be a simple and swift process that resulted in excellent quality documents that had reduced errors in them, and as a result a lower risk to both the client body as well as tenderers.
As technology moved on to become more and more online and cloud oriented, so our clients reverted to their previous habits of using MS Word and MS Excel to prepare procurement documentation. A natural attrition resulted in our withdrawing the availability of this product. The technology that was used become obsolete when Microsoft withdrew Internet Explorer. As a result, the system was no longer used by our clients