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Gov’t announces re-tender for laptop supply

Jun 04, 2011 News

… to review specifications

The government yesterday announced that it will re-tender for the supply of laptops under the One Laptop Per Family (OLPF), and though it will revise the specifications for the laptops, it is insisting that it planned the project properly the first time around.
Two of the original bidders did not meet the requirements, Minister of Finance Dr Ashni Singh said. The government did not want to settle for the third bidder who largely met the requirements, he added.
Bids for the supply of the laptops came from Giftland Office Max, Digital Technologies, and CCS. Of the three, only CCS measured up, though, not satisfying all the requirements.
However, Dr Singh said that the government has decided not to give CCS the contract, and instead is moving to re-tender.
In re-tendering, the government is moving to adjust the technical specifications for the laptops it wants.
Dr Singh said that the specifications the government will now ask companies to bid for would not significantly depart from what was original requested.
The Finance Minister pointed to new specifications for the laptops that would now be sought in the re-tendering process.
“Some of the issues that will inform the approach to the retender will include such issues as the technical specifications of the hardware to be procured, the software specs to be preloaded on the machines and the capacity of the suppliers to offer and service the required warranty provisions,” Dr Singh said.
One IT specialist said that revising the specifications, as described by Dr Singh, hardly seems like “modest” or “minor” changes, since it was Dr Singh who insisted that there was nothing materially wrong with the bid submitted by CCS, the company the One Laptop Per Family office suggested to Cabinet.
Commenting on Giftland Office Max, Sesh Sukhdeo, the Senior Project Officer of the OLPF Project, identified the fundamental problem to be the fact that the brand of Laptop the company presented as a sample, was found to be not a product manufactured by Lenovo, and so the necessary manufacturer’s authorization was not fulfilled.
Giftland had submitted a brand named Lenova. Calls found that the company that makes Lenovo never fashioned such a brand.
In the case of Digital Technologies, Sukdeo said that the information provided could not be confirmed as being accurate, and would have had an impact on manufacturer Dell.
That left the evaluation team with CCS, which according, to Sukdeo “had substantially most of the information the tender required” though some further clarifications were needed.
Dr Singh was careful to say that even though the specifications are being revised, the specifications that were outlined in the original tender documents were “specifications for which laptops are manufactured by large reputable manufacturers.”
In the bid CCS submitted, the Finance Minister said, even though there may have been specific elements that were not complied with, “they did not render any of the machines non functional.”
He said with the testing of the samples that were provided, the “accumulation of experience” suggested that there may be ways the specifications could be “refined” and thereby increase the potential for a greater pool of interested persons and companies to put in bids.
The government has budgeted to spend $1.8 billion on the laptop project this year, and plans to distribute an estimated 27, 000 laptops. Families were given until last Tuesday to apply for the laptops, but with the decision to re-tender for the supply of the laptops, applications have reopened.
The Finance Minister said that up to early this week there were some 33,000 applicants, many of them single parents and people in the low income bracket.
He said that there would now have to be the evaluation.

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