The mandatory integration of green and social requirements in key procurements launched by Romanian public institution invites questions about the readiness of the supply chain to align accordingly. In corporate private sector procurement, the reverse auction has been deployed over time as a particularly useful technique, which has the potential to integrate other attributes besides the price. Hence, it would be a transparent and automated solution to the timely integration of green criteria into private sector procurement, driven by public sector procurement policy. The purpose of this paper is to understand the access of Romanian private sector companies to reliable academic resources to build knowledge in undertaking successful multi-attribute reverse auctions. The research method employed entails the search of Open Access academic databases for relevant studies, government reports and company report of major companies awarded public contracts, as most likely to set an example. furthermore, results are scarce, and furthermore limited to private sector cognizant keywords and Open Access sources. The authors conclude that from such sources smaller companies could not materially benefit from publicly available sources in undertaking a multi-attribute reverse auction. More research on the utility of reverse auction in a Romanian context is of value, with a particular consideration given to the causation for the lack of local case studies.
Insights on the performance of public procurement for water utilities works
The availability of non-reimbursable funds for water supply networks has made the public procurement of construction work in this sector of particular interest in terms of performance. The purpose of this research is to identify key issues and patterns emerging from the engagement between Romanian contracting entities awarding such construction contracts and economic operators. The engagement is materialized through rounds of clarification requests during the offer preparation stage. Following the analysis of the specialized literature, it was found that the subject was not addressed in many scientific publications. The research undertaken was an empirical analysis of selected tenders. The research methodology focuses on the qualitative analysis of publicly available questions and responses, complemented by the analysis of numerical data relating to the same tenders. From the study, it results that a high percentage of all questions analyzed target the technical requirements of the contract notice documents. In some instances, the same questions are found in multiple tenders. Tender evaluation periods are lengthy. The tenders are published with a similar strategic profile (e.g., open tendering, no division into lots) and participation is dominated by bidder associations of multiple economic operators. This study concludes that the quality of the technical requirements does not support the type of strategic profile employed by the contracting entities. The rigidity of written communication makes it unsuitable to mitigate the negative effects of a flawed approach in developing technical requirements for high value, high complexity projects directly connected with Romania’s public water supply challenges.