Details of the Program/Project/Initiative 

a) Brief description of the program/project/initiative 

(n) Code Solutions offers e-procurement services on ASP basis. For this purposes (n) Code
has developed a portal known as www.nprocure.com. Through this portal any organization
can avail of e-procurement services. The portal is enabled with end to end e-procurement
software as per the CVC guidelines. The portal can handle multi currency situations,
multistage evaluations, reverse and forward auctions, catalogue management and so on.

At present Government of Gujarat has made it mandatory for its departments and
corporations to make all its purchases above a certain value through this portal. There are
many large organizations (numbering above 150) making purchases worth crores using this
portal. The savings accrued to these organizations are huge.

So far (n)Code has handled more than 49500 electronic tenders worth of Rs. 95000 Crore
and the current rate is about 1200 tenders a month.

 
b) Why was the project started 

1. Transparency in procurement process: e-Procurement process leads to a

situation where buyer’s and suppliers physical interaction gets reduced
drastically. This also helps in building up of confidence among bidder
community. The process is beyond manual intervention for document
distribution or technical / price bid comparative statement and Result Sharing
facility because of online ‘on the fly’ reporting structure of portal. This also
increases transparency.

2. Shortening of procurement cycle: Average evaluation time earlier required

for physical mechanism was of 30-45 days. With e-Procurement, the time has
been reduced to as low as 6.6 days (average) due to the reports being
available ’on the fly’.

3. Competitive, Flexible and economical bidding process: Any time

anywhere bidding on the internet gives opportunity to all suppliers to have
access and plan bids for the same. Due to increased reach beyond the
borders of local city, district or state, participation of suppliers / bidders
increases. Dependency on newspaper also gets reduced drastically. This helps
to have competitive price.

4. Administrative efficiency: Online bidding process is easy to manage

because of centralized data concept. Voluminous paper files and documents
get reduced to size of small server or CD/DVD as back up.
 
 
 
c) Objective 

Making required information available on the Internet to introduce the transparency

to the maximum extent. To give wider publicity of government procurement
opportunities, cost savings through higher competition and demand aggregation. To
provide an open platform for suppliers leading to an effective tender processing
cycle. Smart management of all e-Procurement related activities.

 
d) Target Group 

1. All Government departments of the state

2. Government boards
3. Corporations of the State Government
4. Nigams, Municipalities & Nagarpalikas
5. Societies under the administrative control of the State Government and which
are funded by the Government
6. The bidder community which involves suppliers, vendors, agencies and
service providers

 
e) Geographical reach 

As the project harnesses technological advantage of the internet, there are no

geographical barriers. The project provides access of service to the supplier
community and the buyer community covered under the project from anywhere in the
world. Therefore e-Procurement has reduced geographical distance virtually between
Government and bidders.

 
f) Date from which the project became operational: 01.01.2007 
g) Is the project still operational: Yes 
h) 10 points that make program/project innovative 
Now‐a‐days whole world is driven by the innovative ideas and lots of players are playing 
around the technology to obtain maximum success from the business they run.  There 
are many in the business of online procurement services as well and hence it is very 
much essential for us to provide unique solutions across the market. Our project is very 
much unique in terms of services offered in the field of online procurement ‐ according 
to the needs of end users. 
 
Our e‐Procurement project complies with four major components (Cyber Law, Public 
Key Infrastructure, Digital Signature Certificate and Security) of e‐Procurement which 
are necessary to provide innovative solutions and hence generate trust among the end 
users. Our e‐procurement project also integrates all the related modules of e‐
 Procurement (Indent Management, e‐Tendering, e‐Auctions, Contract Management, 
Catalogue Management and Online Payment Gateway) in to single unique portal. So, it 
provides an efficient platform for both the department users and supplier community to 
work with ease. 
 
Our portal offers a complete web‐based PKI enabled e‐Procurement solution. The 
solution is offered on an ASP (Application Service Provision) basis.  PKI is Public Key 
Infrastructure – name given to set of policies, procedures, infrastructure and law to 
handle electronic signatures and verification thereof.) 
 
Innovative Features of e‐Procurement 
 
• Government officials (Users) registration and Rights Allocation. 
• Vendor registration & Pre Qualification. 
• Indent creation and approval. 
• Estimated Cost Value (ECV). 
• Tender Document management. 
• Tender Creation and approval. 
• Tender Publishing. 
• Tender promotion via e‐mail alerts. 
• Issue of Corrigendum. 
• Online / Offline Sale of Tender Schedule. 
• Conduction of online Pre Bid meeting. 
• Online bid Submission by vendors (Facility for 2 bid / multiple bid system). 
• Online Automated Bid Comparatives (Technical and Commercial). 
• Online negotiations. 
• Award of LOI. 
• Reverse Auction / Forward Auction.  
• Rate contract management. 
• Purchase statistics. 
• Site Access Reports / Web Statistics. 
• Encryption of bids submitted by the vendor (by the public key of the tender issuing 
authority).  
  
Digital Encryption 
• Data Encrypted with Public Key, can only be decoded by corresponding Private Key 
• No one can decrypt the data without the Private Key 
 Time Based Access 
• Date & Time sensitivity for Tender e.g.   Tender cannot be opened even by 
authorized user before the due date 
• Server Time cannot be tampered as it is mapped through GPS Server Clock 
 
Role Based Access 
• Access to website is on the basis of rights allocated to a User or Group of Users 
• This avoids Tampering in tender content by unauthorized person 
• Existing Organization hierarchy can be mapped‐on  to the system and  the workflow can 
be maintained 
Time Stamping   
• Key processes are time stamped  
• Tender cannot be pre‐poned 
• Tenders cannot be submitted after the due date and time (server time) 
• Tender cannot be opened before the due date and time 
• All processes are logged on time scale 
 
i) List of the 5 achievements of the program /project 

1. Time savings in terms of shortening of Procurement Cycle achieved by the End 
Users. Average time in decision making like from the day when first tender stage 
opening (i.e. Document fee stage) till price bid stage opening was approximately 
30  days  in  physical  procurement  process.  This  cycle  time  reduced  to  6.6  days 
with implementation of online procurement. 
2. Financial  benefits  and  Sustainability  of  any  project  are  of  qualitative  as  well  as 
quantitative in nature. Indicative savings of quantitative nature in this project are 
23.5  days  savings  on  Man  days  and  in  terms  of  financial  savings  approximately 
savings  of  Rs.  48.6  Crore  achieved  against  ECV  of  average  300  tenders. 
Substantial  savings  on  advertisement  cost  is  also  achieved  because  of  drastic 
reduction  in  the  size  of  news  paper  advertisement.  Qualitative  benefits  like 
increased transparency, enhanced trust of suppliers, wider market reach, equal 
opportunity to all etc. are also achieved with this project. 
3. Participation of Government Departments/Govt. bodies/Companies increased 
from 19 departments in January 2007 to 172 departments by the end of May 
2011.  
4. Participation of government offices under various departments increased from 
49 in January 2007 to 1027 by the end of May 2011. 
5. Department users directly involved into e‐Procurement were 190 in January 
2007 which reached to 2617by the end of May 2011. Supplier participation also 
increased from 737 in January 2007 to 15000 by the end of May 2011. 
 6. During the year number of monthly tenders increased from 20 tenders per 
month in the first quarter of the year 2006‐2007 to average 1200 tenders per 
month by the month of May 2011. 
7. More than 14770 Tenders floated last year (2010‐11). 

CSI-Nihilent e-Governance Awards

CSI-Nihilent e-Governance Awards 2006-2007 in the category of Government to Business

best project deployment for its e-Procurement project implemented in Government of
Gujarat at 42nd Computer Society of India (CSI) award ceremony held in Bangalore on
December 1, 2007.

Government Technology Award

Our e-procurement project has also won the Government Technology Award 2007 in the
category of Connected Government (Recognizing excellence in intra-agency and inter-
agency workflow) among the 212 nominations across the 14 countries of Asia Pacific
Region.

National Award for e-Governance (Bronze)

In the year 2008-09 we received the above award for Exemplary Horizontal Transfer of ICT
based Best Practice from the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances,
Government of India.

 
j) List the 5 key challenges faced while implementing the program/project initiative and 
how they were overcome. 
 
Challenges faced during the project implementation 
1. The implementation based on the focused area of Government Process 
Reengineering. 
2. Efficient training to both the government employees and supplier community 
3. Making required information available on the Internet to introduce the 
transparency to the maximum extent. 
4. Wider publicity of government procurement opportunities and cost savings 
through higher competition and demand aggregation. 
5. Introduction of effective mechanism to provide un‐interrupted help‐desk 
services. 
6. Provision of open platform for suppliers and hence effective tender processing 
cycle. 
7. Smart management of all e‐Procurement related activities 
Difficulties and Struggle, these two words are associated with initiation of any project. But to 
overcome from this situation we have to pass through the different phases where we face lots 
of challenges. We experienced the same situation during the execution of e‐procurement 
project as well. Below mentioned are some of the aspects where we faced some other 
challenges. 

1. Political
2. Social
3. Economic

Political

Political aspects related to e-governance for example are: formulated strategy and policy, laws
and legislation, leadership, decision making processes, funding issues and political stability.

Social

Examples of some of the social aspects related e-procurement implementation are people,
(level of) education, digital divide, rural areas vs. cities, literacy, IT skills.

Economic

Economical aspects related to e-procurement are cost-savings, business models, e-Commerce,

and spin-offs of e-governance.

Measurements:

In actual scenario it was really very hard to understand the mentality of end user both from the
government side and from the supplier side. End users were not prompt enough to adopt the e-
procurement some how. It was our tremendous help desk services and efforts to encourage
them to participate in e-procurement made things to move in positive direction.

Facts behind success

• Adequate Infrastructure

• Hosting of application in secured data center environment (Own)

• 2 Lease lines’ connectivity (Airtel & BSNL)

 • Efficient PKI enabled software application with payment gateway integration (Own)

• Team of 35 skilled persons deployed at various level for e-Tendering

• 24 x 7 Help Desk services

• Remote level support any time across the Gujarat

• Training & Presentation arrangement as and when asked by users

• Western India based only Certifying Authority

• 200 locations across the India for Digital Signature Certificate Support

k) List the 5 points how can the programme serve as a model that can be replicated or 
adapted by others? 

Our portal, www.nprocure.com, is loaded with features such as security, accountability,

non-discrimination of bidders, open competition and equality of access. Due to this the e-
Procurement process has gained tremendous confidence of not only the government but
also the public. Our software, consisting of the above mentioned features, can easily be
replicated as a project as well as SAS (Software as Service) model.

e-Procurement enables the existing purchase process to be made online. The availability of
the internet and software and other associated technologies has made it possible to convert
paper based processes to the electronic ones.

The application is the software which makes it possible to carry out the procurement
process online using computers and internet, replacing paper based documents. The
application plays a pivotal role, as it is responsible for actual execution of the tendering
process online. A robust and dynamic application seamlessly integrates with the existing
systems allowing the user organization to customize it according to organizational policies.

There has been considerable improvement in delivery in the form of shorter procurement
cycles, better costs through greater competition, greater transparency through
confidentiality of the purchase process and availability of the better reports because of
computerized process. The better information availability and consolidation can help
improve future purchases as well.
e-Procurement enables the user to introduce ease and efficiency without compromising the
required procedures of the department.

e-Procurement provides transparency, results in savings of time and money, shortening of

procurement cycle, ease of operation to the implementing department and to the bidders /
suppliers / vendors.

 
l) List 5 points to elaborate on the scalabilty of the programme/project/initiative 

Scalable:

The project has been built on 3-tier architecture. There's a presentation tier, which provides
the front end for the site. There's a business logic tier, which handles several tasks including
authentication, authorization and workflow management. Lastly, there is a database tier,
which is used to read and write the data from its database.

The business logic has been kept separate from the presentation logic by design. This
makes the system more scalable allowing new departments to be incorporated into the
system. All workflow and navigation code has been abstracted from the user interface for
achieving this. Being an online system wherein the users are logging in, getting
authenticated and filling tenders, the system needs to have proper security. For this, a two-
factor authentication - digital signatures and 128-bit SSL encryption, have been
incorporated.

As it is a web-based application, no installation procedure is required at the client’s

machine. However, as it is a secure site and some encryption/decryption processes are
being done, some security settings are required to be done at the browser level.

One time user creation & account activation process is required for accessing the website.

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