Page 120 - Procurement guidelines for smart sustainable cities - A U4SSC deliverable

Why it's important

Public officials and stakeholders should tell suppliers how they will be evaluated if they bid for a
piece of work. The chosen criteria should be:

• objective, that is free from bias, prejudice or subjectivity;

• proportionate and relevant to delivering their outcomes; and

• designed to deliver value for money.

What it means

Public officials and stakeholders should set evaluation criteria for:

• cost effectiveness – based on the “whole life cost” they calculated in the planning phase;

• technical merit – the performance and reliability of a proposed solution;
• skills and experience – the competence of the supplier; and

• after-sales support and assurance.

Each criterion should be given a value or “weighting” to reflect their relative importance to you.
This can be done by using a scoring scheme, for example:

• cost effectiveness – 20 points
• technical merit – 15 points

• skills and experience – 5 points

Whilst cost will always be an important evaluation criterion, in most circumstances quality should
be weighted higher than price. This recognizes the importance of service delivery over simply
buying a product at the lowest price.

To avoid a bias towards low-cost, public officials and stakeholders should:

• ensure that they consider whole life cost rather than just initial cost;

• consider using a low-cost threshold below which the bid will be considered abnormally low;
and
• include a minimum quality threshold based on technical merit.

Technical merit should be measured objectively; for example, by allocating points to:

• performance – such as coverage or network capacity

• reliability – how mature is the proposed solution and is it well maintained?

106 Procurement guidelines for smart sustainable cities | May 2023