Procurement Service to go online

The Public Procurement and Property Disposal Service (PPPDS) is to change its manual procurement process with automated one.
The service that is responsible to handle massive procurement for the federal government is procuring billion of birr worth of goods and services from local and international suppliers. However the manual procurement has made the process to take unnecessary time and vulnerable for corruption.
Tsewaye Muluneh, Director General of PPPDS, told Capital that the procurement process of other countries is automated and that makes their activity fast and easy.
“Besides it accelerate the procurement process and tackle the corruption practices, we can manage to handle massive purchase in a given time,” Tsewaye told Capital.
“I have already tabled the case for the board that overview the Service which is chaired by Minister of Finance,” she added.
The board has accepted the proposal and already the process to commence the modern system is being undertaken by the Ministry of Innovation and Technology (MInT).
“I have information that the initial work is finalized by MInT,” the Director General added, “we expect we will review the initial work that the innovation body come up with in the coming days.”
She said that the transition to automation will change the operation of PPPDS.
At the current stage the procurement process takes a very long period that limits the capacity of PPPDS, while it is handled easily in other countries, according to Tsewaye.
She believes that the automation will save significant sum of money of the public and boost the advantage of economic of scale that is the target of PPPDS.
“My vision for this pubic organization is to computerize all its operation,” she asserted.
“At the initial stage we will use the technology of MInT but the Public Procurement and Property Administration Agency, which is supervisory of PPPDS, is working on higher scale for the modernization,” she added.
The major share of the annual budget that sometimes consume more than 60 percent of the government budget is procurement and it may take 15 percent of the total gross domestic product of the country.