Selection of consultants to undertake large infrastructure projects – Part one

In February 2018, I supported a team of seven colleagues to select detailed design and construction supervision consultants for a water and sewerage infrastructure portfolio comprising three large water and sewerage projects worth a total of US$ 200m.

The consultants were selected through a Quality and Cost Based Selection (QCBS) method. QCBS uses a competitive process among short-listed firms that takes into account the quality of the proposal and the cost of the services in the selection of the successful firm. Cost as a factor of selection is used judiciously. The relative weight to be given to the quality and cost is determined for each case by the nature of the assignment.

The selection process was initiated by the development of appropriate terms of reference and an expression of interest (EoI) to shortlist the most suitable consultants. Thereafter, the shortlisted consultants were invited to submit technical and financial proposals, and one firm secured the consultancy contract.

In this two-part article, I share with you what transpired during the entire selection exercise, the challenges that arose and the lessons learnt.

The Expression of Interest (EoI)

In the first quarter of 2018, we agreed with our financier to prepare an appropriate EoI to secure the services of a detailed design and construction supervision consultant.

Prior to commencing the procurement process, the financier set a precondition that the terms of reference for the consultancy had to be completed first. Fortunately, a draft was in hand. The final version was swiftly prepared and submitted to the financier for their No Objection.

As the terms of reference were being finalised, the structure of the EoI advert was also taking shape. It contained the name of the project, the borrower and the financier, a brief description of the scope of work to be undertaken by the consultant, the evaluation and selection criteria and the bid submission details.

The advert was announced in the local daily newspapers and on selected online portals of the borrower and financier, eight weeks after a decision was taken to adopt the EoI procurement method. The terms of reference was cross-referenced in the advert and made available to all potential service providers on the borrower’s online portal.

Bid submission for the EoI

Forty bids were received on the day of bid submission. Five of these bids were submitted by email to an address indicated in the EoI advert whereas 35 were submitted in hard copy at the physical address indicated in the advert.

Each bid submission was assigned a unique identification number that was tagged to the hard copy submissions of each bidder. In addition, the soft copies of each submission were retrieved and safely saved in an appropriate file.

Two weeks prior to bid submission, we developed an evaluation manual to guide each evaluator on the procedure to adopt to score each submission in accordance with the evaluation criteria set in the EoI advert. A team meeting was convened to ensure all evaluators understand how to go about the evaluation exercise.

Bid evaluation for the EoI

The evaluation exercise was scheduled to last two weeks. During the evaluation, I was asked a number of questions that I attempted to answer as follows

What is our evaluation criteria?

The evaluation criteria was indicated in the EOI advert and was set as follows;

i. A minimum of 12 (twelve) years of core business as a consultant in undertaking feasibility studies, detailed designs and construction supervision of water and wastewater infrastructure projects.
ii. Experience in at least three similar assignments.
iii. Experience in similar conditions with at least two projects in countries with similar economic conditions.
iv. Presence of appropriate skills among staff in the areas of project management, water network planning, sanitation chain management, civil, electromechanical, water/wastewater process engineering and environmental engineering.

Amongst all these submissions, how many firms are we required to shortlist and why?

Normally, we are guided by the procurement regulations or guidelines of the financier. In this specific case a minimum of five firms and a maximum of eight firms will be shortlisted.

What shall we do in case we have more than eight firms that qualify?

When we have finalised our evaluation of all the submissions against the set criteria, the firms that meet the minimum requirements shall comprise our long list. From the long list, we shall rank the submissions based on the number of similar projects they have undertaken. Our shortlist shall comprise a maximum of eight firms.

Under evaluation criteria two, what shall we base on to ascertain whether the projects presented are of similar scope and complexity? Shall we use project value, level of engagement of the bidder or the scope of services rendered?

Appreciating the level of complexity of a project is a skill that comes with experience. The longer you work on such projects, the more intimate you will become with the challenges that abound during the life cycle of the project. In this case, the terms of reference should give you a good understanding of the nature of this assignment.

A project could be of very high value and yet have scope of work that bears no relationship with our specific assignment. Such projects should be discarded from your assessment.

In terms of level of engagement, a firm might present a project or projects that are similar to our assignment but the actual input of the company is questionable. In some cases, firms bid as joint ventures or associations and present past projects where they had negligible input. This means they lack certain experience, which might be a prerequisite for implementing our assignment.

In addition, it is common for a company to claim to have worked in association with another on a similar project and yet they were invisible throughout the entire assignment. Normally, supporting letters of reference from former clients will come in handy. A thorough due diligence should be sanctioned by the evaluation team if necessary.

How do we determine the number of years of experience on assignments of a similar nature?

Similar projects are those in the same field (discipline). For example, a 50m pedestrian bridge, a 500-metre cable stay bridge or a 50-meter vehicle bridge are not similar in the sense that they have different levels of complexity but are similar in nature because they are all bridge projects and bridges are a means of transportation.

Our assignment is for a large water and sewerage infrastructure project. If a company has been involved in water and sanitation projects, their projects in this field are to be considered as projects of a similar nature but they may not all qualify to be projects of similar scope and complexity.

In determining the number of years of experience, simply assess when all the projects were undertaken and count the number of calendar years from the earliest start date to the latest end date of the projects.

The evaluation exercise was a success. These are some lessons learnt.

Lessons learnt

1. The evaluation process is bound to reveal some flaws in the procurement process – How can you make use of such revelations to improve future procurements? For example, it was not explicitly clear in our advert whether recently acquired assignments, those midway implementation or those nearing completion should be included in the bid submissions. For uniformity, we took a decision to consider only completed assignments. Large complex projects of this nature tend to demand more resources from the consultant. Whereas the terms of reference were clear on the scope of services to be undertaken by the consultant, the evaluation manual did not guide evaluators on the minimum project value below which a project is discounted as not being similar. The manual was amended during the evaluation exercise to provide this clarity.

2. Value in the paperless office – soft copy submissions enable evaluators carry on with the exercise from virtually anywhere. Therefore, together with hard copy submissions, it is a good idea to allow submissions in soft copy preferably in PDF.

3. Think through your evaluation criteria – The basis for selection or non-selection of a bidder should be dummy proof and clearly understood by the bidders and evaluators. Desist from creating new criteria as the selection process is underway and do not make your selection criteria too academic and impractical.

4. The value of good submissions – Bidders should endeavour to submit project data in a form that facilitates a quick and detailed extraction of relevant information for the shortlisting exercise. Evaluators get very fatigued and do not labour too much with poor submissions. Your submission should compare to a bride and groom that everyone has their eyes on at a wedding feast because evaluators want to complete the exercise in the shortest time possible. From my experience, compact documents, which are comprehensively laid out with relevant information, usually stand out from the rest.

Evaluators get very fatigued and do not labour too much with poor submissions. Your submission should compare to a bride and groom that everyone has their eyes on at a wedding feast because evaluators want to complete the exercise in the shortest time possible

Eight firms were shortlisted. A No Objection to the bid evaluation report was secured from the financier and the shortlisted firms were invited to submit technical and financial proposals.

Continue to Part Two

© The Builders’ Garage 2018. Permission to use this article or quotations from it is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to thebuildersgarage.com as the source.