Customer: Procurement department of the Province Drenthe in the Netherlands.

The objective of the project is to close a contract for renovation of the asphalt and broadening of the N34, a much-used regional road. The entire tender was conducted on the Negometrix Platform, not a single piece of paper was used. In total 18 road construction companies registered as tender participants

Twelve contractors completed their digital participation requirements and were invited to take part in a reverse eAuction on february 12. At the Provincal Headquartes a large audience of purchasing and public roadworks professionals watched the auction closing after 29 bidding rounds. All participants lowered their bid at least once while the winner KWS lowered its bid 13 times: their lucky number this time!

The estimated duration of the road works is 12 weeks and the budget is 2.16 M€.

Landmark condition in this unique project was that the award criterium was the Economic Most Advantageous Tender rather than the classic Low Price criterium. Every week earlier completion of the road works job within the stipulated time of 12 weeks added a bonus of 200.000 € for the contractor. So, a contractor could win the auction with a higher price than its competitors but a faster lead time.

The quotation process and eAuction were executed by means of the NegoMetrix eAwarding tools. A NegoMetrix consultant supported the project during the specification, the call for tender process and the eAuction itself.

The project steps executed by the procurement department through the NegoMetrix software were:

1. Specification of the works including all parameters and weighting factors. Users can create evaluation criteria and sub criteria of what they need resulting in structured specification. They can choose between knock-out criteria, yes/no criteria, multiple-choice criteria, numerical data evaluated within a range, and open questions or a combination of any. Once criteria have been created, each needs to be given a weight according to the desired priority. (October 2008)
2. Invitation to suppliers. Once the specification is completed, suppliers are invited by automatically generated email to access the web, log in on a secure site and see the specification and selection criteria. They can answer these questions and upload documents if required. (November 2008)
3. Buyer analysis. Smart tools and graphs immediately generate overviews and analyses for the buyer. The buyer can quickly see the completeness of the quotes and the differences between the suppliers' quotes. Once all elements of the suppliers’ quotes have been evaluated and scored, each supplier is automatically given a total quality score (between 0 and 100%). In an interactive price – quality scale the price/quality ratio is set. The monetary value of the calculated quality is shown. (December 2008)
4. Reverse Auction. At a pre-set date and time, the buyer and all participating contractors log in through a standard web browser. Participants can see their rank on the basis of their bidprice and their quality. Through the short bidding round technology, suppliers are allowed to improve their bid affecting overall price quality rank. The Auction took place on februry 12 February 2009, the winner was KWS Infra (www.kws.nl)