Public Procurement Service Enhances Fairness in Bidding for Large-Scale Software Projects

The Public Procurement Service (PPS) is improving the evaluation method for large-scale software (SW) projects to promote fair competition.

The PPS announced on the 11th that it will revise the "Detailed Criteria for Contract Proposal Evaluation by Negotiation of the Public Procurement Service" and implement it from the 13th of this month. The revised detailed criteria focus on applying negotiation contracts to technical services to encourage fair competition and reduce the cost burden on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) caused by excessive proposal presentations.

Provided by Public Procurement Service

Based on the revised detailed criteria, the PPS will introduce a professional evaluation system for large-scale SW projects to enable businesses with technical skills and capabilities to participate in actual projects. The professional evaluation system allows experts in four specialized fields?information technology development, information security, data construction, and digital technology?to participate and take charge of in-depth evaluations when necessary.

The final evaluation will be conducted by combining common evaluation scores (60%) and expert evaluation scores (40%). This applies to large-scale SW project groups with project amounts of 4 billion KRW or more (10 billion KRW or more for maintenance projects).

When a demand agency requests an evaluation of the suitability of a negotiated contract proposal, the PPS will conduct qualitative evaluations on behalf of the demand agency to supplement the agency's lack of expertise and proactively prevent potential conflicts related to the evaluation.

The revised detailed criteria also clarify the procedure for determining false information in proposals and impose disadvantages when defamatory content about other companies is included in proposals or presentations. This aims to prevent acts that cause administrative waste such as lawsuits due to false information or defamation in proposals or presentation materials, and to institutionally prevent delays in contract signing and disruptions in project progress for demand agencies.

Going forward, the burden of proposal presentations borne by SMEs during the online evaluation process will also be reduced. The threshold for proposal presentations will be raised from the announced amount of 220 million KRW to 500 million KRW or more, expanding the scope of projects that can participate in bidding without proposal presentations.

Until now, SMEs participating in large-scale SW projects had to cover additional costs incurred by outsourcing proposal writing to specialized firms on their own. However, after the revision of the detailed criteria, the PPS estimates that about 4,000 companies annually will save approximately 19.5 billion KRW in proposal writing costs.

Lim Gi-geun, Administrator of the PPS, said, “The PPS will continue to listen to the voices of the industry and continuously improve unreasonable systems so that large-scale SW projects can be successfully carried out in the field.”