By Ferdinand G. Patinio
MANILA, Nov 4 (PNA) — Five companies including Smartmatic-Total Information Management (TIM) submitted their respective proposals on the multi-million electronic transmission negotiated contract for the May 2016 elections.
Comelec’s Bids and Awards (BAC) Chairman Helen Flores headed the opening of the bid documents submitted by prospective bidders EZ Com Telecommunications and Solutions Corp., Arronet Solutions Integrator Inc., EdgeComm Inc. and SOG Philippines Inc.
Of the five bidders, EZ Com submitted the lowest bid at Php 558 million, followed by Smartmatic, Php 507.7 million; EdgeComm, Php 549.4 million and SOG Phils., Php 555 million.
Arronet Solution submitted a bid of Php 2.1 billion.
The Approved Budget for the Contract (ABC) is Php 558 million. The deal involves election results transmission services.
Before opening the bid documents, Flores said that they were looking for three things, legal compliance or legal requirements, financial proposal and technical capability.
She also noted the submission of the lowest bid does not make it as the best deal.
“We want to make it clear that the lowest bid is not necessarily the best offer. We want to make that clear. There will be an equivalent of a post qualification evaluation during which the technical working group (TWG) may require additional documents that would answer some queries or validation need. It will be the equivalent of a post qualification in a regular bidding,” Flores explained.
It would be recalled that there were two failed bidding conducted for the said project that resulted to the holding of negotiated procurement.
Based on the Comelec’s timeline, the simultaneous evaluation of all proposals will be conducted from Nov. 5 to 10. The TWG is expected to submit its recommendation to the BAC on Nov. 11 while the latter is set to present its resolution before the commission en banc on Nov. 13.
The en banc is set to give its decision four days after while the Issuance of Notice of Award will be given on Nov. 18.
The preparation of contract and contract signing will be on Nov. 18 to 20. The Issuance of Notice to proceed will be on Nov. 20.
Meanwhile, Commissioner Luie Guia, in charge of the source code review, reported that the review is on its 3rd week.
“This is the 3rd week of source code review with accredited eight organizations who can nominate reviewers for the review,” he said.
He added, “The reviewers have been giving their observations. We have combined their observations and very few of them are code related but are not critical.” (PNA)