By Azer N. Parrocha
MANILA, (PNA) — Biddings for the private company to work on the new license plates may be over, but for a certain government-run agency, time and costs could have been cut down, if authorities had let them do the job.
After countless postponed bids, the Land Transportation Office (LTO) by the end of September, will have released the new plates to be fashioned by the winning bidder—a joint venture of J. Knieriem B.V. Goes and Power Plates Development Concepts, Inc.
The Dept. of Transportation and Communication (DOTC) assured this since August, though news on the progress on the plates has been very minimal to date.
On another note, little had Filipinos known that other than the National Printing Office (NPO), another government-run agency is tasked with the errand to print government accountable and non-accountable forms.
While the NPO takes care of the usual forms, the APO Production Unit Inc. or simply APO handles the more specialized security materials—and of these could have been the country’s license plates.
APO is an agency under the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO), a fully integrated and highly competitive printing company established in 1967; its office located in NEDA Quezon City Complex, Quezon City.
All along, the country had its very own agency which provided services for pre-press, press, bindery, security printing and custom publication but the question is: Why didn’t the DOTC and LTO consider APO in the first place?
A need for explanation
APO EVP and Gen. Manager, Jaime Aldaba and PCOO Undersecretary for Administration and Finance, Eduardo Visperas would both agree that it was because many were, for a fact, not aware of the production unit.
“They are not aware,” Aldaba told PNA in an interview long before bidding was finished. “When we did the presentation to the LTO last May, we told them that we had initiatives (to handle the plates) but we needed to explain it because not everyone was aware.”
Visperas, meanwhile, said that APO had quite a rough beginning and it was only later in 2010 when it was reorganized to be a now viable enterprise.
“APO was not prepared in the beginning—it did not have the capability,” Visperas said. “When we took over in 2010, we had to retool APO and make it into a viable enterprise.”
“Now it is a viable enterprise, we have repositioned APO so it can undertake printing of specialized printing materials,” he added.
Since then, Visperas said that APO has been in touch with the DOTC and the LTO in presenting the unit’s solution to license plates and put an end to backlogs and overlaps.
“’We can solve your problems,’ we tell LTO, I don’t know if we have convinced them enough,” Visperas said.
Government to government
Aldaba said that if APO was assigned to undertake the production of the plate, it will be done under one facility—one contact instead of a number of facilities and contracts.
“We can handle the bidding of materials for the items that we need to put together—aluminum, reflective film, software and security features,” Aldaba said.
“We can build those things to put together a world class plate for our client agency,” he further said. “This way they would have had fewer worries.
“The features, methods and technology behind the new plate will be owned and handled by the government, unlike other supply contracts with a security aspect, when the contracts expire, normally, the government is left with an empty back—private contractors pack up and leave, databases are not functional,” he added.
He explained that since the plates were for the Filipino people, none other than the government-run agency should do it since it puts them all in the same boat.
“The chances of continuing even after contact with APO expires is better for the agency, because it’s government to government,” Aldaba said.
“This is the business of security printing—we can allow our clients to watch and monitor, that doesn’t happen today with private contractors since they are not allowed to watch,” he added.
Has always been private
Perhaps the DOTC and LTO have gotten so used to the fact that private companies have handled the plates ever since was what APO’s Gen. Manager suggested.
“In fairness to the agencies, they don’t realize that there is such a law that goes through recognized government printers,” Aldaba said. “It’s just the instinct of agencies to follow to procurement law 9184 as a default.”
Aldaba said that the APO has been trying to approach various agencies offering its services as a security printer and explaining to them that they can acquire the service of APO via a negotiated procurement.
He said that a negotiated procurement is actually an alternative form of bidding a procurement, which the DOTC and LTO seem to not be very knowledgeable about.
On the other hand, Visperas said that although he was sure that the DOTC and LTO had good objectives, it was too bad that PCOO’s solution was never considered a top priority.
“We have been looking at this job for a long, long time and we have been looking at best practices in other countries,” Visperas said. “We have come up with an end to end solution for car plates.”
By the looks of it, the APO’s plans are all mapped out—expect for the little detail that these plans can no longer be carried out all because even in the government, it is difficult to convince each other. (To be continued…)