Mar 2007: Tender Support Tool Wins Chartered Institute Of Building Award

The International Innovation and Research Award, sponsored by the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB), the Faculty of Architecture and surveying (FAS) and the innovation company, PERA, recognises the important contribution made by architectural surveyors to innovation and research in construction.

This year's winner, East London based chartered building consultancy, Asset Management Surveyors Ltd, decided to enter the innovative support tool into the prestigious competition because of its remarkable ability to provide a transparent audit trail in the tender analysis process.

Steve Phillips, director of AMS, said: "The requirement for transparency has come about as a result of a move away from the traditional culture of accepting the lowest monetary bid tenders, towards the consideration of value-based procurement. By providing transparency in the tender process, the OVID-BV support tool allows value based tenders to be properly assessed.

Blueberry implemented the OVID-BV support tool in C# and .NET, and the whole project was completed in 2 months.

Since its completion, OVID-BV has been successfully used on a number of regeneration projects to provide a transparent audit trail for the tender decisions taken.

The tool:

Provides a standard, user friendly way of entering the data of the suppliers and the criteria against which they are judged.
Automates the calculation process and displays the intermediate and final results.
Provides a hard copy output that can be used to form an audit trial of the contractor selection process.

The stakeholders are now able to choose the specific project attributes from a drop down menu, which includes all the value attributes established as necessary. The software also provides a facility for new attributes to be added as required.

One of the innovative aspects of the tool is that it assesses value attributes against each other and provides a method for comparing and scoring different types of attributes on a 'like for like' basis.

Finally, the results screen presents the score for each contractor.

Commenting on the project, Steve Phillips said: "The windows based software has assisted stakeholders in understanding that best value is not simply about measuring capital cost or quality, but it is about the optimum combination of whole life costing and quality – in other words, it is about fitness for purpose and meeting the user's requirements."

Steve Phillips went on to say: "I'd like to thank everyone involved in the project – particularly Blueberry Consultants, because without their input we truly wouldn't have had anything to submit in the competition. They played a big part in turning our thoughts into reality and were a joy to work with."