Tender Management System

Abstract

This study is aimed to automate the tendering process of Ceylon Electricity Board, the largest electricity company in Sri Lanka, which controls all major functions of electricity generation, transmission, distribution, and retailing in Sri Lanka. CEB hasa generation division, a transmission division, 4 distribution divisions, project division, and an asset management division existingwith manyTendering Boards.Currently, CEB handles the complete tendering process manually. Difficulty in finding historical tender information; lengthy approval process with respect to time and thereby maintaining higher reorder levels; taking a lot of hard copies of tendering documents which are exchanged between several parties in different physical locations and thereby difficulty in maintaining information security; physical presence of tender committee members is a must requirement during the approval process; prone for illegal activities of course may be difficult in tracing; are few of the issues faced by the Board of Directors and the Management of CEB, which are associated with current manual tendering process.All these issues are addressed by the Tender Management Systemdesigned and developed under this study. This is a web based system, and thereby it could only be accessed by its authorized users at different hierarchical levels of CEB, and by its registered suppliers. This was developed using Free and Open Source Software which is more secure and having less deployment cost. Further, the cloud-based services were used to generate bidding documents, and archive them, where it reduces the hardware cost and the maintenance cost.Finally, the system performance was tested and evaluated by obtaining feedback from sector experts whom were comprised with domain experts and software development experts. A specific questionnaire was developed for this purpose to identify the feedback in a likert scale, under 05 main parameters comprised with 16 sub-parameters. The feedback was quantified by using a measurement scale introducing a weightage to each identified parameter. As per the feedback results, the parameter “Appearance” has received 48% achievement; the parameter “Usability” has received 62.1% achievement; the parameter “Functionality” has received 82.9% achievement; the parameter “Performance” has received 64.7% achievement; the parameter “Security” has received 80% achievement.The areas of improvements were also identified, and those will be addressed when the system is deployed at the commercial level.