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final topic this afternoon is the European single procurement document the espd I don't come from a government background not involved in putting some of these procedures together um but I do know through our training through the work that we do um getting to grips with some of these developments as they come out is hugely important uh this is another acronym I'm even myself trying to get the right way around so forgive me if I don't um but it relates to a very very crucial part of the bidding process which is all to do with selection pre-qualification um and we meet countless businesses that are very very good at what they do technically very proficient but many of them just cannot get through what used to be the pqq as now the European single procurement document um and suddenly an open field where everyone can bid is reduced down very quickly to a small number so rest in peace pqq there were quite a number of emails came out really over the last few months which on first reading you might actually think the pqq has been abolished and I'm sure everyone in the room would have thought fantastic we'll just not do that anymore uh sadly that's not the case uh the pre-qualification stage exists as normal that won't change very much and it comes in different formats so under what you would normally call the restricted or the two-stage procedure which is quite a common way particularly in certain sectors to uh manage the procurement you will still have a first stage what was the pqq and that will now be replaced with this European single procurement document and only the people who are accepted at that stage will then go through to Tender so the procedure business as normal other than the documents that you're filling in quite often you have the open tender which is quite nice so everyone can bid all at the same time you get a chance to put your prices in which for a smaller business can be the area where we compete the best however in every invitation to Tender there is always what they would call the selection stage and it's quite normal that if you don't pass the kind of past fail elements of that the rest of your tender won't actually be looked at so really in every part of procurement this whole concept of pre-qualification and now this single procurement document is going to be absolutely crucial so what's in it uh for those of you who've already had a look um actually not many surprises I don't think it follows quite a similar shape and form to what was known as the standardized Scottish pqq uh that was something which has kind of evolved over quite a number of years I think in some of the even the paper documents that you would see you would start to see the same shape of the pqq submissions um and laterally it was something that was actually stored on the PCS tender system um now for those of you who are may be slightly newer to the Scottish procurement scene we have two PCS portals uh we have the public contract Scotland which was mentioned a bit earlier where everything is advertised um and occasionally you can uh also bid in through that but over the past few years has been the PCS tenders module and this has I'll show you an example of that later on uh where you can both see the tenders but most important it's becoming the main area where you actually submit your tenders and it's where the European single procurement document information is going to be held on suppliers so it's very important to get registered for that um your subcontractors if you're working in a Consortium your partners will also have to be registered as well so we'll come and have a look at that that portal shortly but in terms of the content the information shouldn't be anything that is going to alarm us there's not many sort of hidden tricks in there uh large elements that we probably don't have already so uh part one one will include information about the buyer the procurement the procedure as normal and then part two is information concerning the bidder so that's very straightforward uh you know who's the main contact your business where it's based and it will ask at that point about any Partners or any subcontractors and the guidance in that area would be that they should also be producing uh European single procur M document if they have a significant part to play in the actual procurement and what you're bidding for now that's still a slightly gray area uh we get asked quite often is somebody A supplier or a subcontractor um and quite often someone is just literally supplying certain amounts of goods more in a background position or it could be a major manufacturer in which case as your sort of combined bidge you would be expecting uh some of these subcontract actors to complete the forms as well there's been quite a lot of discussion uh again from the sort of higher level from Scott and Lori this morning about exclusion criteria but again in the previous versions of the pqq this was classed generally under business probity and divided again as it is in here uh certain areas where it's a mandatory exclusion and then this new term which you'll see very European I think is self- cleansing measures so certain exclusions you may declare and say yes you know we've had a director who's perhaps been bankrupt in a previous business however and then you're given the opportunity to describe what measures as an organization you've put in since then to make sure that that doesn't impinge in a negative way on this particular bid um that tended to be quite an open area in the old pqq so you know if yes please explain and then a fairly open text under the European single procurement document you will find now quite a detailed form with requests for you know if it was a conviction when was it uh what's the measures You' put in place uh and so on so very much more regulated I would say in this kind of area in practice however I certainly in the bids that we've had I I cannot recall anyone ever saying yes to any of the exclusion questions um obviously having self declared these then as a business you do leave yourself open if you've misrepresented the situation that anywhere along the line even if you've had the contract awarded that could be stopped if at this stage you've not declared something uh in a proper way the good news is in the forms as before yes no questions unless you're actually declaring something along the way so I think for most of us this is a bit that we scoot through the pqq and we think oh this is great we're getting on like a house and fire we're halfway through and it's nearly all done uh and then we come to the technical questions so part four this is very important um for all of us as biders because this is where the scoring comes in and this is the difference between being one of the five six maybe seven if you're lucky that might go through to Tender stage uh or losing out and then basically you're out of the procurement uh opportunity suitability is one of the areas that that I can see reading through the documents where there's a slightly more um demanding set of questions than were there before uh again behind all of these by the way it's a set of standard questions so if I'm a buyer putting together uh the single procur document I can only go through and choose the questions on the form that sit behind all these subjects so you may get questions which before tended to be couched in terms for non-uk businesses only but might ask you about trade registers um some sort of official listing for example um and there are already areas in the UK If you were like a professional body like Architects uh GPS for example uh I've seen one tender last week where they said well actually under this area we would expect all your construction staff to have cscs cards so anything where there's quite a formal uh sort of register that basically you can't practice without it you're going to find that sort of question now in suitability economic and financial standing uh the buyers will be under a lot more pressure now to State any minimum uh turnover terms for example and all of that will have to be in the contract notice so you'll be able to see uh easily as the notice comes out you can expect those to be a lot more detailed now uh in general it's two sets of accounts so again not very different and then various options if you can't produce the accounts and so on so again it will be up to the buyer to make sure that they're selecting the right questions at this stage uh Insurance again tends to be another area so again that would have to be declared and I certainly in practice most of the documents that we see all of this is laid out very very clearly uh even going into the pre-qualification stage as to what the the different levels are that you have to reach Technical and professional ability I'll just go on to but again uh this is all about looking backwards up to this point so again with a single procurement document there shouldn't be any questions asking you about how you will deliver a contract everything must be retrospective up to this point and this again is an area where typically uh smaller companies companies may be new to the market can find it very difficult to come up with good reference points we we'll have a look shortly at the the format for that and then the final part is to do with quality assurance and environment again mostly about compliance um and an opportunity to tick the box if you have ISO 901 or ISO 1401 uh or provide more details which again for many of us as small businesses uh we need to find a way to describe our quality and Environmental Management Systems uh that looks like ISO and again for small business and that's part of the sdp training by the way for anyone who's interested uh how to represent your own Quality Management in a way that's systematic and professional so the overall shape I think not many surprises the biggest sort of new element I think really is this idea of self-certification so previously for um the pqq format you had to attach documents uh if this was in paper format and I've still seen a few anyone done paper submissions still yeah so occasionally you are literally just copying policy documents accounts and so on or having to attach them with your submission as well uh the deal now is you self certify and then the buyer can request those documents at any stage so a certain amount of leeway there it could be in order to get through from pqq to Tender you have been selected but you will still have to produce your documents or obviously if it's an open tender it will be before the contract's awarded you will have to produce but it means only the person who's about to be awarded the contract will have to go to the effort to produce all the documents you can refer to an electronic source so perhaps some of the registers a construction lines a good example so you know you refer to your number and give a website where the buyer can then check automatically through an electronic register and the idea of self- cleansing which we've discussed already so again quite a detailed questionnaire but in theory if you are able to provide evidence uh of self-cleansing then that shouldn't lead to automatic exclusion um a certain amount of subjectivity possibly it would be interesting that the public sector buyers get very frequent policy notes and advice uh on how to treat these type of uh assessments uh just uh as an aside actually uh it's been mentioned earlier the procurement journey and the suppliers Journey uh I would recommend if you're quite serious about your bidding and you want to know how it all works in the background the procurement journey is something which we as suppliers can very easily uh check out on the web uh we've used it before people wanted to know how the feedback sessions were run for example what's best practice uh and now again for all the different changes here for the legislation all of that will be available not just to buyers but to us too to see how these things are being operated and significant subcontractors uh as I mentioned now will be expected to fill in the document too the biggest um issue potentially that I see here as as everyone gets to grips with the European single procurement document is that it comes with a effectively a shopping list of standard questions um and that was a similar situation with the standardized pqq um with the standardized pqq we notice a trend that the forms came with all the questions so somehow someone's gone through it yeah well questions are there we'll just have all of them regardless of the size of the contract the complexity or whatever um with the European single procurement document the approach is the same so buyers will be going through training at at this point just to make sure that from the different options of the questions they choose the ones that are relevant and proportionate to the procurement from the supplier's point of view I think that's still a good thing because effectively once we know what all those questions are and you you can see them uh listed uh on the PCS tenders portal it means we can plan for every eventuality so there are some questions there we might look at and say well we'll never be asked that because it relates to I don't know study contracts or construction um but in terms of preparation it means we're no longer in the situation where every pqq you got looked a little bit the same till you got to the technical questions uh and I'm sure you've all had that that horrible experience where you know you I think you've answered the question and it pops up again but it's a slightly different format or it's asking it in a different way so this swings completely to the other end very standardized I think it will bring with it some problems because some of the language is a bit EU European I can say that having worked for the European commission for about 10 years um but at least I think as suppliers we're going to know what we're we're up against in terms of questions um and the recommendation um as well as that if say I don't know City of Edinburgh Council puts out a tender as part of that they're asking for this European single procurement document uh biders who bid for another uh tender that's fairly soon after that shouldn't have to be uh resubmitting the same document twice over um so that I think is another area that would be interesting to track to see if that's something that can be achieved because as a a certain amount of uh organization and administration for the buyers to be able to know who's already uh submitted that okay so uh as I say the the notice period for buyers is going to be a lot more honorous uh again a lot of training going on just now because using a generic document like this it means that the buyer has to be very clear which of the questions apply and what the different criteria are that will apply to it um we've some seen a couple of documents one again just last week from a university and they've published the European single procurement document and it has its fixed whatever numbers of questions 1.2 2A da daada um but what they've done is a mapping then of the requirement for the University so it's absolutely clear as a bidder which of the questions relates to which of the criteria and I think that hopefully there's going to be a lot more of that practice ice so that we're not left with a very generic document trying to match it ourselves to what the the biders are looking for so how's it going to be used um quite a number of buying authorities in Scotland still use public contract Scotland and the sort of postbox type facility so they haven't moved to use the PCS tenders modulus it's known um in that case they are tending to then publish a Europe European single procurement document as a Word document you fill it in separately and you would upload it then as part of your submission just uh I'll just move sorry one ahead this is one that's come out recently so you can see I'm sorry it's very small for most people but um this is actually an open tender but it's part of the documentation that you would normally get when you register under PCS you can quite clearly see the um espd document listed there as well the other system and this is something I mentioned uh right at the beginning is that the um European single procurement document will actually be an integral part of the envelopes as they call them in the PCS tenders module um can I just check quickly PCS tenders how many people are using that great so really most most everyone uh it's a very different system to public contract Scotland so PC yes I would say it's reasonably clear it's very gear to advertising so on uh PCS tenders is based on something called Bravo Solutions uh and anyone that's bidding South of the Border you'll come up against it in loads of different other government departments uh quite a busy quite a complicated interface using it for the first time we've had a lot of clients that have literally Switched Off and decided not to bother um but I'd encourage you to persevere um but going into the um public tenter Scotland uh portal you would generally have a qualifications envelope the technical envelope and then commercial which is for your pricing and the qualifications envelope now will be the European single procurement document and that's how it's going to be laid out you can go into to PCS tenders and actually start to fill in all the content that you need in advance for this uh European single procurement document or if your bidding and you fill in the qualification part and those of you who've used it already will know it's then automatically stored uh and then it's reused it's reproduced so when you're bidding again you don't have to keep filling in all the details but you do have to keep checking it and making sure that things are up to date uh and that it's the right information that's been loaded again so if you wanted to go ahead and say right I want to actually see what the um document looks like I'm going to fill it in in advance if you click on uh it's manage uh manage the profile which is on the main menu as you come in and then you'll be taken into an area where uh various tabs so your basic information basic profile and it's this one here the extended profile uh so again not very accessible terminology but the extended profile is now your European single procurement document so it's very transparent uh you can go in uh check out all the questions and as I say the only uh caveat in that really is that you will see every single question and it's not necessarily for what you're bidding for that all of these will actually be used by the buyer but it means the suppliers it's very easy for us now to go in and actually start filling this in uh those of you who've used the system before will find out that probably a lot of it is maybe already filled in so you just need to check it because the pcst team have actually taken anybody who's filled this in and done a mapping from the old standardized pqq to the new system so ideally you may run down these are the 100% ones are the kind of business property type questions so uh easy ones there and then you can log and map and see how complete your uh entry is from there the technical and professional ability so again an area very very important usually quite a large proportion for the scoring in the standardized pqq uh you're given the opportunity to fill in a template and uh if it's works you'll be asked to go back five years and demonstrate projects of similar scale scope whatever and services and goods tends to be 3 years uh and usually the buyer will have some sort of um leeway as to how many projects that they ask for in the previous standardized pqq it was only two projects and that very very restrictive uh particularly if you're bidding as a Consortium uh but this is the format so nothing complicated um the only thing I would say as a general recommendation if we're reviewing people's pqq documents uh and checking why they haven't got through it's generally because they haven't put enough relevant detail in the project descriptions so when you're being encouraged quite a lot to be precise be concise actually if somebody's got 10 points to give to each of your projects they going to need 10 points worth of relevant information on the projects so not just the value the services um what was it on the project that delivered sustainability perhaps environmental aspects anything Innovative uh did you employ apprentices work experience some of the community benefits so the more you can expand your project the more chance you will have particularly if it's a limited choice to actually uh score better at this pre-qualification stage so this is some of the the listings of the other uh areas of technical abilities as say these are all the questions that are on the form but the buyer may not necessarily choose to include some of these but it tends to the initial questions are quite difficult we found initially to work out what people were necessarily asking for so what technical bodies can you call on um technical facilities for example so a lot of these might actually be internal resources uh and to me it might be about well certainly um any sort of quality any sort of research that you have going on um technical sort of I don't know Reliance on other like surveyors or Professional Services in Social care area do you depend on uh other bodies to come and help you technically deliver it um I find certainly in a lot of these a lot of the wording makes you think about sort of construction type projects and Engineering projects whereas all they mean by technical is the the the ability the methodologies of what the ability to actually do the job um there's one here number four is about Supply Chain management and that's a new standard question that I haven't seen before it's one that comes up in certain sectors but that may be one that you would be asked to look at now in particular because supply chain is a very important part of community benefits so again something perhaps new for you to to think about at this stage uh you'll be asked for the qualifications nothing new in that at all uh and at the bottom they've put in as one of the standard questions a question about Environmental Management uh again for some of us as smaller businesses could be quite a challenging area to to answer Manpower largely this is UN changed from some of the standard questionnaires but again good preparation you will be asked generally for sort of 3 years and quite often divided into different types of Staffing um and the bottom one this is quite often overlooked as a chance to put in quite a good scoring so what's uh the technical facilities plant and Equipment um again sounds a bit kind of construction engineering focused but nowadays to me this can be sometimes an area where smaller companies score very well because you might have a good work planning system uh you might have a very good communication system uh so it's not necessarily about vehicles and machinery and so on so anything in back office anything that keeps your business moving that you think is worth to mention there should be added in and then the last uh section here is on the quality and this again is quite a difficult area if you don't have uh a certified system under I so or efqm for your quality under the standardized pqq you ticked the box for ISO you didn't have to answer any of the other questions now you can take the box uh and you only get one single box now to then describe what your quality management system is if you don't have ISO um I would actually recommend if you don't have ISO go back to some of the questions and that's old standardized one because it gives you a nice clear list of how how do you communicate quality uh how do you train your staff in quality what's your quality control system um and even without ISO it's perfectly acceptable that you can present a good account of your quality management system and it shouldn't be a hindrance to getting through at this pre-qualification stage um our large our largest client has a turnover of about 2.3 billion and they have no ISO 901 in the area where they're bidding uh and they're on all the major Frameworks in the UK but they have a very good internal system that they've been able to describe uh in a similar way so what sort of proof do you have of the system and then in all of these questions There's an opportunity to link through to a website um or a reference which would be an internal appendix if you like for documentation that you would then produce later so just finally going forward uh there's nothing that I can glean uh in the standard uh European Standard single procurement document on health and safety which I think is going to be an interesting because certainly most of the pqqs I've filled in have had pages and pages of health and safety uh I don't have an answer to this so I'm looking forward to hearing from somebody more expert than I am uh where this would come in it may come in at tender stage so you're then describing as you go forward to deliver the service what your health and safety proposals will be uh business continuity has disappeared as a standard question uh although again I would probably expect to see that put in as part of your quality management system um and suppliers and buyers are at an early stage uh so I would encourage you if you're bidding use the Q&A system uh to ask questions we've put in one last week uh already about some of these technical registers cuz it wasn't clear at all what the buyer wanted and the buyer came back with two or three examples which immediately sort of clarified and helped take us forward and of course uh watch out for supplier development program so uh there's a course specifically it used to be called uh I think filling in the pqq or getting through selection H so that of course now will be largely geared to the European single procurement document um and there's webinars so this one here again you can divide up over three sort of sessions uh and just do that from the desk okay so good luck uh thanks all for staying on and as I say I can stay around if there's any specific questions and obviously sdp and public contract Scotland and Scottish government team uh also I would recommend they're ready for your questions as well thanks a [Applause] lot