United Nations Public Service Awards Case Studies

Before the initiative, government procurement in Singapore was conducted manually. Buyers from various government agencies had to perform time consuming tasks, such as, creating hardcopy purchase requisition forms & purchase orders, routing paper-based approvals, mailing hardcopy purchase orders before tracking deliveries and making payments. The buyers would have to advertise in major local newspapers to publish the notices of tender invitation. Interested suppliers would have to collect the tender documents from the government agencies, prepare their tender proposals and physically drop the tender proposals into the tender boxes located at the various government offices.

After the tender is closed, the tender bids must be opened and endorsed by a tender opening committee, as prescribed by the governing tendering procedures in the presence of witnesses. The recorded schedule of tender bids were have to be checked and verified before posting up on an agency’s notice board and made accessible to the general public. Tender award notices are also likewise posted on the agency’s notice board. Suppliers had to visit the notice boards at the various government agencies at the various locations to find out information on the tender schedule and awards. After the tenders were awarded, all the down stream procurement processes of contracting, goods receipt, invoicing and payment were done manually.

The above processes were time consuming, effort intensive and subject to human processing errors . Also government procurement opportunities had limited reach to the suppliers at large, via publication through the newspapers. There were no sharing of supplier pool across the agencies; the individual buyers had to do their own sourcing of suppliers. This limitation in sourcing constrained competition and hampered the buyers’ ability to get the best value for money in their purchases.

In addition, there was also no central means of capturing procurement data from across the government agencies, making it very difficult to consolidate and aggregate the procurement data across government agencies. Such data was necessary for the government to conduct trend analysis government spent.

What is the initiative about? (the solution)
The Government of Singapore has implemented an integrated one-stop government procurement portal, named Government Electronic Business (GeBIZ), to enable all the public sector agencies to transact electronically with suppliers. The successful implementation of GeBIZ has brought about transformational changes in the way that government procurement is conducted in the public service. It has also changed the way that the suppliers do business with the government. The key benefits of GeBIZ are as follows: Improve Governance GeBIZ is designed to adhere strictly to public sector procurement policies and its principles of transparency, fair and open competition, and value-for-money. For the policy makers, GeBIZ has helped to guide procurement activities in all government agencies such that they are conducted in a consistent manner incompliance with procurement policies laid down. Increase Procurement Effective and Efficiency For the government agencies, GeBIZ has helped improve work efficiency and reduce procurement lead time. All the procurement functions such as purchase orders, invoice verifications and payment can be done electronically in GeBIZ and cut down the procurement time as well as reduces errors. Increase Supplier Reach The use of GeBIZ has simplified the sourcing process and increased the reach to suppliers, including suppliers located overseas. As at Jan 2009, there are about 35,000 suppliers registered as GeBIZ Trading Partners which means that buyers can simply publish the business opportunities in GeBIZ and obtain competitive bids online from the large pool of suppliers, both local and overseas. Reduce Procurement Cost With a wider suppler reach, competition would increase. It is estimated that the cost savings from better procurement visibility and control, increased access to more suppliers and use of cross agencies period contracts can result in a typical saving of 3-20% of procurement value, depending on the procurement category. Increased Business Opportunity for Suppliers For the suppliers, GeBIZ has provided a convenient channel for them to trade with the entire government electronically. It brings about more business opportunities, increased confidentiality and more importantly, reduction in business cost. Channel for Communication As a key platform that reached out to a wide supplier community, GeBIZ has become a effective channel for the government agencies to communicate their key initiatives to the supplier communities and solicit feedback from the suppliers. Analysis on Government Procurement Another key benefit that GeBIZ brings to the policy makers is that it makes procurement information across the entire public sector to be readily available. This was not possible previously. The availability of the GeBIZ data has enabled the government to be able to do analysis on government spent and to proactively improve itself. Facilitate Demand Aggregation Using GeBIZ as a common platform has facilitated the implementation of demand aggregation across government agencies. The analysis of the GeBIZ data has also enabled the government to identify potential areas for public sector wide demand aggregations. Demand aggregation has benefited the government through economics of scale, e.g. in 2004, DSTA undertook demand aggregation for 18 procurement categories and brought about a total of S$15M savings for the public sector.

Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
The concept of GeBIZ took root in year 2000 when the Ministry of Finance (MOF) in Singapore decided to bring together different ‘pockets of activities’ or systems in the public sector related to procurement to create a single integrated system. The system would support the entire procurement life cycle activities between government agencies and the suppliers electronically. GeBIZ is a join collaboration project among three public sector agencies: MOF, was the system and process owner in-charge of the overall government procurement policies and processes. It funded the development cost of GeBIZ as well as the first 2 years of the system operations. Defence Science & Technology Agency (DSTA) was responsible for the development and implementation of the system. It also played the key role of system integrator and provided procurement domain expertise during the system implementation. DSTA has been appointed by MOF to manage and operate the GeBIZ portal after its initial development. The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) played the role of overall project and infrastructure management for GeBIZ and provided policy guidelines on info-communication technology and security requirements. Other stake holders of GeBIZ include representatives from various government agencies and suppliers who are interested in doing business with the government of Singapore. A project steering committee, led by MOF, was formed to define the project objectives, milestones, and provide oversight for the implementation progress. The project steering committee comprised members from DSTA, IDA and major government agencies with extensive government procurement experience. Three working groups with members from several agencies were subsequently formed. The GeBIZ Business Process & Policies working group, chaired by MOF, addressed procurement process and policies issues relating to the business interactions with suppliers, they contributed effectively on the streamlining of work processes and defining the business requirements into the system. The working group were also involved the initial change management & communication efforts including soliciting user buy-in, and more importantly, the education and enablement of the suppliers from the respective agencies. The GeBIZ Technical working group, led by IDA, was formed to plan and implement the GeBIZ technical architecture and infrastructure setup. The GeBIZ Application Implementation working group, led by DSTA with members from key government agencies was responsible for the development and implementation of the software system to meet the business requirements. The Application working group also developed the detailed implementation plan for pilot trials, participated in the user testing and acceptance and involved in the deployment and implementation of the system. To ensure smooth running of the GeBIZ portal, DSTA has set up a GeBIZ Service Centre (GSC) which manages the GeBIZ website and provides helpdesk support to the 45,000 buyer and supplier community. GSC played the key role of facilitating change management and community development in the GeBIZ portal. Its function includes dissemination of changes in policy and system capabilities; providing customer support and facilitate problem solving; and collection of feedback from the buyer and supplier communities. The GeBIZ system has been enhanced continuously based on the user feedbacks.

Describe how and when the initiative was implemented by answering these questions
a. What were the strategies used to implement the initiative? In no more than 500 words, provide a summary of the main objectives and strategies of the initiative, how they were established and by whom.
The major challenges faced in the implementation of GeBIZ were in change management. Both buyers and the suppliers had to embrace the new way of conducting their procurement and doing business with the government respectively. Although the procurement policies were uniformly across government agencies, the working group recognized that there were differences in procurement practices across the government agencies. Much effort was spent to streamline the procurement processes and to implement a ‘standard’ workflow that would ‘best-fit’ the existing practices. This sometimes required agencies to adopt a different workflow on the ground. Focus group were formed to understand the ways the buyer agencies did their procurement, possible ways that they could do it electronically, as well as the amount of time needed for buyers to adjust to the changes. Another challenge faced was the initial resistance from public sector buyers to switch from the manual procedure to the electronic procurement workflow process. The buyers were used to the old way of doing procurement which was the “tried and tested” method and were apprehensive about e-procurement. Buyers also cited having difficulties to get suppliers on board as e-procurement was also new to suppliers. To help agencies to transit, a phased implementation approach was adopted in the implementation of GeBIZ. The simplest type of transactions were implemented first so that users could experience for themselves the ease of use and convenience provided by the system. As the users slowly gained confidence in the system, more complexities were added to the system progressively. In general, the users needed time to learn the system, adjust and made changes to their procurement processes. This approach had facilitated the user education and adoption of the system. As part of the change management effort, ‘Champion’ users, from both the buyer and supplier communities were identified to share their success stories with the rest of the user community. Communicating such success was important to influence more government agencies to participate. Management buy-in was also an important critical success factor. On this point, much effort was spent in communicating to all levels from top management to middle management and ground users to share benefits and advantages of GeBIZ and to garner their support. After each phase, a review was carried out with feedback collected from the members of the working groups, and the community of agencies’ buyers and sellers. Important lessons were learnt and applied as the team progress to the next phase. New features and capabilities were gradually introduced with increased users’ participation. The pool of buyers and sellers slowly built up to a critical threshold that will make the GeBIZ system self-sustainable. Eventually, the full-fledged functionalities were developed in GeBIZ, and system had proven to its users of its usefulness and gained strong user confidence. The policy maker then took the decision to mandate the use of GeBIZ across the entire public sector. That decision was welcomed by both the buyers and sellers, and GeBIZ had transformed the way the suppliers do business with the Singapore government.

b. What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
The evolutionary journey of GeBIZ can be broadly defined into 5 stages. Stage 1 is termed as ‘Online Web Presence’, an early stage where GeBIZ serves as a publication tool to dissemination government tender information with simple searches features. It had increased the transparency of government procurement and cultivated the habit of using internet to publish and search for business opportunities in the public sector. GeBIZ entered into Stage 2, the ‘Interactive System’, between 2000 to 2003. This is the stage where the transactional capabilities of the system were progressively developed and implemented. This included modules on trading partner registration, purchase of item using online catalogues, online invitation and response to tender and quotations, electronic publication of tender schedule and awards and the issue of purchase orders, supporting good receipt and e-invoice etc. In short, Stage 2 focused on the development of functionalities within the GeBIZ portal. The issues of system integration between GeBIZ and the external systems were address in Stage 3, the ‘Integrative System’. Between 2003 and 2004, GeBIZ evolved into an integrated e-procurement system. Financial system interfaces and payment gateway were built to link up with agencies’ internal ERP systems to GeBIZ. The integration of procurement and the financial systems enabled GeBIZ to support the entire procurement to pay process end-to-end. Complex purchasing models, such as framework agreement module were added to the system. At the end of Stage 3, GeBIZ had developed the full suite of e-Procurement functionalities and built a large community of users and suppliers. MOF mandate the use of GeBIZ for all public sector agencies in late 2003. Integration was further enhanced in Stage 4, termed the ‘Extended Services’, between 2004 and 2007. The integrative platform of GeBIZ has enabled the extension of procurement services beyond the organizational boundaries. Visibility of government procurement data in GeBIZ had made it possible to aggregate the demand across the public sector. Since 2003, extensive effort was spent to demand aggregate across the entire public sector and establish bulk period contracts. This has resulted in substantial economic savings to the government. The GeBIZ portal became self-funding in 2004. This made it more customer-centric and offered many value added services to bring value to its customers. New services such as GeBIZ Mall, an online shopping mall where the suppliers could proactively market their goods and services to the government buyers were developed. Other pro-business initiatives such as the publication of Pre-procurement Plan in advance by all government agencies were also introduced. With the millions of hits on GeBIZ daily, the GeBIZ portal became an effective channel for communication of business initiatives between the government agencies and the suppliers. GeBIZ is currently in stage 5, where ‘Knowledge Management and Strategic procurement’ is taking center stage. Business intelligence (BI) tools were introduced in GeBIZ in late 2006. With the overall visibility of government and organisation-wide spending, BI could help to move government procurement up the procurement value chain from a transaction-centric model to one that is proactive, collaborative and efficient.

c. What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
In the early stage of the GeBIZ development, the challenges were mainly project management issues and technical obstacles. The nature of GeBIZ placed a very stringent demand on the underlying technical system. It has to be a secure, robust and reliable Internet-facing system, capable of handling high volume and complex transactions across multiple networks with high performance without compromising the confidentiality of data, especially the tender responses. As GeBIZ was targeted to be the common platform for the purchase of all goods and services for all the government agencies, its design had to cater to all the business scenarios. Yet, the system must hid its underlying complexity and present to the users a very user friendly and self explanatory interface so that it could be easily used by the thousands of suppliers and government buyers without the need for extensive user training. A team from DSTA with strong system and process integration capability was assembled to manage the technical challenges during the development phases. In terms of project management, one of the greatest challenges was the differences in procurement practices across the Ministries and Government agencies. Much efforts and thoughts were expended to streamline the procurement approval processes and to implement a ‘standard’ workflow that would ‘best-fit’ the existing practices. Another challenge faced was the initial resistance from public sector buyers to the adapted to the procurement workflow process offered by the GeBIZ system. The project team had to knock on the doors of the individual buyer agencies to ‘sell’ GeBIZ and to manage their expectations. Extensive change management effort were initiated to convince the benefit of GeBIZ, provide user training, hand holding the initial use of the system and manage user expectations. System enhancements were made progressive based on the user feedback to improve the user experience. The other challenge was the interfacing of the GeBIZ system to the different back-end financial systems used by the various government agencies. Different ERPs have their own way of supporting the accounting structure and organization set up. GeBIZ had to unify the system interfaces such that a common interface was adopted at the GeBIZ end. The rapid built up of the buyer and supplier community to a substantial critical mess in GeBIZ is another challenge. Government agencies were encouraged to bring in their own suppliers into the GeBIZ and share them with the other agencies to build up the supplier community. In addition, an one-stop service centre was set up to support the user community in the adoption of the system. The service centre also allowed the project team to systematically collate user feedback and improve the functionalities of the GeBIZ system. To date, the GeBIZ Service Centre provide call centre and email support to a user base of 45,000 from both the public sector agencies and supplier community. The challenge is to keep the system stable at all times while introducing new functionalities so as to minimize the demand for support at the GeBIZ Service Centre.

d. What resources were used for the initiative and what were its key benefits? In no more than 500 words, specify what were the financial, technical and human resources’ costs associated with this initiative. Describe how resources were mobilized
The project management team was critical to the development of GeBIZ. It comprised members from MOF, DSTA, IDA and 5 other major government agencies. Heavy resource commitment from all members of the project team was required during the initial project development phase. In addition, there were few other teams which worked concurrently with the project management team. The infrastructure team which responsible for the set up of the IT infrastructure, the application team which responsible for the development and implementation of the software application system, the user functional team which helped to define user requirements and performed system testing and acceptance and the procurement team in IDA which migrated the existing IT period contracts into electronic catalogues for the users. Last but not least, the GeBIZ Service Centre staff which provided the user support and facilitated the adoption of GeBIZ. Additional resources were activated for quality assurance, system integration studies and system operation and security audits. GeBIZ was developed in phase over a long period of time, the project team size varied between 30-50 over different period of times, depending on the intensity of the project activities. MOF funded the initial development and infrastructure cost of GeBIZ as well as the first 2 years of the system operation at a total cost of S$36M.

Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
GeBIZ is a sustainable and transferable initiative. There are three reasons that the GeBIZ will be sustainable: a. Over the past few years, GeBIZ has built up a large community (approximately 45,000) of buyers and suppliers who are actively transacting in GeBIZ on a daily basis. New suppliers were added to the trading community every year. With the government expenditure to fuel the market, GeBIZ portal will continue be a vibrant market place for both the government buyers and the suppliers. b. Both the government procurement processes at the government agencies as well as the business processes at the supplier end had been transformed and fully embraced e-procurement. The GeBIZ system had fully integrated with the financial systems at the agencies and achieved seamless integration of the end to end procurement to pay process. c. GeBIZ has been operating on a “self-funding” model using fees collected directly from its users since 2004 to fund its operations. The self-funding model proved to be a financially viable business model. The GeBIZ portal operator managed to keep the charging rate constant despite the substantial increase in the user base and transaction volume in the last few years. The GeBIZ portal continued to grow with more enhancements and services being added each year to bring higher value to its users. GeBIZ was implemented at national level as a whole of government initiative in Singapore. It is felt that the system, its principle and practices would be transferable to other developing countries, especially to those countries that aspire to adopt e-procurement for government procurement and wish to join the Government Procurement Agreement under the World Trade Organization. In fact, there were many countries expressed interest in the GeBIZ model for e-Procurement and visited the GeBIZ Service Centre. DSTA has productized the GeBIZ system and made it easier for the other countries to adopt GeBIZ for their own use.

What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
The successful implementation of GeBIZ has brought about many benefits, transforming the government procurement in the entire public sector. It has also change the way that suppliers do business with the Government. GeBIZ has improved transparency and reach to suppliers in an open and fair way. It has enhanced the accountability in the public sector and strengthened the compliance of government procurement policies. It has also brought about substantial savings to the Government of Singapore and increased the overall efficiency and effectiveness of government procurement in the public service. The critical success factors of GeBIZ are: a. Strong management support and continuous commitment to e-Procurement b. Strong commitment of the project team to make the project a success and deliver real value to its users c. User support and confidence in the system d. Willingness to change and readiness to embrace new ideas by all stack holders.


Institution Name:		Ministry of Finance
Institution Type:		Government Agency
Contact Person:		Anita Lai
Title:		Head(Procurement & Resource Systems)
Telephone/ Fax:		63328856
Institution's / Project's Website:		63374134
E-mail:		anita_lai@mof.gov.sg
Address:		100 High Street, #06-03, The Treasury
Postal Code:		179434
City:		Singapore
State/Province:		Singapore
Country:		Singapore

The Problem

Solution and Key Benefits

Actors and Stakeholders

(a) Strategies

(b) Implementation

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

(d) Use of Resources

Sustainability and Transferability

Lessons Learned

Contact Information