Adobe Success Story

Streamlining procurement with Adobe PDF forms
The German Federation, its states and its municipalities budget €250 billion yearly for investments and for the purchase of consumer goods and products. In Berlin alone, with nine senate departments and 12 district offices, the procurement volume for deliveries and services totals over €700 million per year. The procurement process for positions in the construction sector is especially time-consuming and costly due to the complicated application procedure.

The process begins with a job announcement in a publication such as the federal job site listing. Companies submit written bids along with the necessary job application forms. To send these documents, the respective office charges the bidder administrative, copying, and shipping costs, fees usually amounting to at least €20. The bidder then fills out the documents by hand and sends the entire bid in a sealed envelope to the respective administrative office. Confidentiality is of great importance as the offers are only opened and read after the submission deadline.

This is an extremely time consuming process for all parties involved, one which was executed more than 1,000 times in the Senate Department of Urban Development in 2004 alone. As a result, the state of Berlin began advertising its jobs electronically that same year. After advertising throughout the EU, the Senate Department of Urban Development finally chose to work with the company ventasoft. ventasoft, in association with ava-online, is Germany's leading provider of Internet based job auctions complying with German federal law. Headquartered in Berlin, the company enjoys its status throughout Germany as the only procurement auction operating in accordance with the German Signatures Act capable of supporting ava sign certified bidding software. ventasoft also developed signature and encoded software as a client and server solution. ventasoft, founded in 1999, has 30 employees.

Benefits

• Reduced government and industry costs for completing and processing project bids
• Simplified bid completion and selection processes
• Increased transparency of bid selection
• Minimized errors on bids by reducing manual processes
• Accelerated bid review by integrating electronic forms with backend systems

Project Details

Intelligent forms
The main criterion for selecting a solution was the possibility of making the process completely electronic. Above all, digital forms should be able to be filled out on the computer and saved locally. Together with ventasoft, the Senate Department of Urban Development chose to use the Adobe solution since it was the only one to provide a form that fulfilled the necessary requirements. "Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) is a de facto standard we can rely on," Wendelin Christ, manager of ventasoft GmbH says. Detlef Mehser, project leader of e-Procurement at the Senate Department of Urban Development states, "Adobe PDF is a secure technology for filling out forms, and makes it possible for us to improve the quality of our work."

Since February of 2005, e-Procurement has been a reality. By the end of the year, all job advertisements should be posted via e-Procurement. Bidders can decide whether they want to post their offer the conventional way or via e-Procurement. At www.vergabe.berlin.de, companies can browse all current job advertisements, download the documents on their computers, and fill them out at their leisure. The PDF forms are intelligently designed and the bidder is only able to fill out the boxes designated for him. At the same time, validation tests are conducted and the sums entered are automatically linked together. If, for example, a bidder checks a box indicating a subcontractor's participation in a project, the online form automatically indicates that other appropriate forms must also be completed. This helps avoid mistakes that often lead to an applicant's elimination from the selection process.

Adobe solutions deliver intelligent, dynamic forms
For the bidders to be able to fill out and save the forms with free Adobe Reader software, the forms in Adobe PDF have to include additional rights. For this purpose, administrative employees create a form with Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Designer and send it to ventasoft. The specialists from e-Procurement check these Adobe PDF forms for technical purposes. Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions then equips the Adobe PDF forms with functions that allow users to fill out and save the forms using Adobe Reader software. The administrator then posts the form on the e-Procurement site.

"It was important to us that the bidders could fill out and save forms off line," Mehser explains. "Adobe was able to fulfill this request. However, forms frequently change and often have to be replaced by a certain deadline." Wendelin Christ adds, "With HTML this wouldn't be possible. PDF forms can be created early on and be made available by a certain date."

After the bidder has completed all necessary forms, he assembles them in a package which, with the help of ventasoft's free software ava-sign, is sealed with a certified electronic signature. The only things he needs for this are a card reader and a signature card. Now, the signed job offer package only has to be uploaded to the online job posting site. When the transfer is complete, the bidder receives a receipt with a certified time stamp that confirms when and where the encoded data was submitted. The electronic job offers remain sealed until the opening of the bid.

Automated data workflow accelerates processes
All data entered by the bidder into the Adobe PDF form can be read and transferred to the administration's assessment tools via the ava-online e-Procurement platform. This facilitates an easy and smooth comparison between job offers. Through the validation checks stored in the Adobe PDF form, entries and amounts no longer have to be manually checked. "With the paper-based procurement process, amounts often had to be recalculated," Mehser explains. "Even a little miscalculation can make all the difference. Recalculating 10 to 20 offers by hand for each bid cost us unnecessary time and money."

Companies using e-Procurement no longer have to go through the long and expensive process of advertising on paper, and they can even participate in the awarding of a contract shortly before the deadline. Job offers can now be cancelled on short notice, changed, and resubmitted. The new system enables small- and medium-sized companies in particular to greatly reduce the time and effort it takes to apply. It also allows them to participate more equally in public and private job advertisements. These companies benefit from e-job announcements and can download the necessary documents free of charge so they can immediately tell if a position is relevant to them or not.

After a successful start in Berlin, everyone is optimistic that e-Procurement will be further implemented. Joachim Eckert, project leader of e-Procurement in the Senate Department of the Interior announces the next step: "The feedback in the portal for the construction job site has been so positive that we now want to implement a central platform for procurement modeled after VOL; that would be the model for success with a future."

Comprised of 135,000 total employees, Berlin has a two-tier administrative structure which is divided into nine senate departments and twelve district offices. The Senate Department of Urban Development is one of the offices responsible for handling public construction contracts.

A safe bet thanks to intelligent forms in Adobe PDF
The e-Procurement form predetermines the fields that a bidder can complete, and only these may be filled out when a bid is submitted. Other fields may only be changed by the procurement agency. "E-Procurement has led to more transparency and security with public bidding and provides new motivation for the competition," says Mehser. "The quality of the entire process has been improved."

Adds Eckert, "By digitalizing the entire procurement process, we have been able to cut costs and have reached a milestone in e-government and modernization of our administration."

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