Hello everyone. Welcome back. Coursera global public procurement for UN procurement. Last session, we talked about specific procedure, how to do ICB, International Competitive Bidding. UN is basically following most of the e-procurement based on ICB processes. There were, as we mentioned attentiveness steps where we have to follow, and you can see from slide, there was a need generated that trigger asset allocation and then figure out how to procure the asset, and then they conduct market research. After market research and specific requirement, put on advertisement asking for the industry participation, and the industry write the proposal and submit the proposal evaluating contract and the contract issue and the contract perform, and after contract perform, the payment made, and then you fade out contract closure. These are the 10 different steps. Today we're going to talk about how to prepare and then what position do we have to get prepared to do the business with the UN. Let's have a look at it. If you can look at the slide over here, Number 4 at the market research, there's unique word of the tendering process, EOI. EOI, expression of interest is one format similar to RFI, request for information. The detailed information about how to do it and what is it you have to do, is it will be covered in next session. But basically in today, we're going to talk about why we need this step. In the market research when UN want to procure a specific product or services, when they do not know enough information or they do not have enough information over the vendor or supplier, they want to send out EOI, expression of interest. Expression of interest is asking industry respond if there is anybody can, for example, supply the UN agency with CCTV, with the AI imbedded the solution in there. It's like face recognition program pinted in there in comparison with the conventional CCTV. UN want to buy different things like that, innovative technology or even with some normal conventional item, quite open the coming up with market research. The benefit for industry to participate early stage of EOI because you will be responding to contracting authority, in this case, the UN, to tell them everything about why your company can do what you can ask for, whether it is a CCTV or office furniture, anything. Normally EOI does not include a pricing. When you submit EOI proposal, UN will use that additional information for additional supplier or vendor, quite often, UN may say, "Okay, now we have enough information for EOI. We have more than 10 company deploy on the EOI." Among 10 companies, we have very good purported, five of them are very valid, another five are not very good. They could say, "Now we are going to have a limited competition with ITB." The ITB mean invitation to bid. If the procurement policy to change it to ITB, that mean only those company participated in pre-qualification phase would be invited to tender in the main business. In other word, if your company is not submitting EOI for particular business opportunity, you may be missed out entire opportunity for main tender. This is the reason why I always recommend industry to participate EOI or US federal government RFI, request for information. Request for information, EOI is pretty much similar procedure, a little bit different, but overall you can say a similar thing. The one in UN use a EOI versus we as federal government use RFI. If you look at the entire process of the UN procedure for public procurement, it will start with the EOI first, expression of interest. When EOI phase done already for the market research, and then UN may come back with RFQ. RFQ is request for quotation. A service or product and simple and short-term or small amount of money. Then next level up is RFP, request for proposal. Normally product and service combine, larger contract, a longer period, the more complicated the proposal, and then you've got to put a lot more effort and people for project medium. We can't say which agency, there are so many major contracting authority in the world. For example, a country like Korea, Japan, Saudi, or all other Asian country. As a country, as the public authority, or contracting authority, you may have a different way of procuring your needs. Some company or some country or contracting authority may have a pre-qualification phase. UN does have the same approach, but not always need a pre-qualification. If there are so many companies that want to bid on particular opportunity, it will be very difficult for Contracting Officer to read dozens of the proposals or 20 proposals to go through because it will take forever to read or evaluate 20 proposals. Therefore, quite often, contracting authority come up with a mechanism called shortlisting. The shortlisting is the mechanism to select those who qualify the bidder from pre-qualification phase. So UN procurement and EOI, and RFQ, RFP, these are the step. We can say quite often people are asking whether a UN public procurement is easier in comparison with the US Federal Government or any other country based, or the EU. But I can't say exactly which one is easy or harder, because it's all depend on the requirement. But the one thing that we can tell, UN public procurement is fairly good example of the e-procurement. Majority of UN public procurement are based on at the moment e-procurement, that mean you don't need to be in that location when you submit the bid. You don't need to talk to them before you submit the paper. Unless there is a unique requirement to have oral presentation. Most cases, you don't even need to appear in front of them to do presentation for your proposal. But after you get the contract, you may have a kickoff meeting that you may have opportunity to see Contracting Officer from the UN. So most of the people listening in the Coursera, maybe you are from Asian country, I will say the India, maybe for example, because India is the second most actually popular or most well known supplier to the UN. So mostly Asian country, it is quite attractive market to participate the in the UN public procurement. So when we prepare the public procurement proposal, there are number of different way. On this e-learning platform, we will not have any mechanism to teach you how to write technical proposal, but this is something that you have to do it offline environment. You really have to actually take the time and effort, learn how to put them. Technical writing is not an easy step to do so, but there is a number of different way to do it. There are a number of different curriculum developed by various education institution, is quite open you can do them. So at least in this instance, in our Coursera program, you can learn the concept. So when we participate any of the UN public procurement whether is EOI, RFQ, RFP, there are some principle of what you have to do to write your proposal. The buyer in this instance, contracting authority, they need to have a specific solution. So when they come up with RFQ, RFP, even with EOI, the reason they issue such a paper requirement is that they need something, they need product, or they need performance, they need the services. Therefore, your proposal is not for you. Quite often when we teach this curriculum at KAIST Pigeons School with IGMP mechanism of course, we have a simulation class where you actually have a case study and people writing proposals. Quite often, you're writing proposal for the sake of writing proposal, which is very unproductive, you should not do that. What I mean by that, you're writing proposals to make happy about your company, to make actually feel satisfaction on your behalf, you feel good about writing proposal. But writing proposals on the region, you're writing proposals with the business. Therefore, you need to focus, who is your buyer? Who your client? You are writing proposal for your client. Your client needs and what they want to have it and the quantity and a function. So your entire proposal, whether it is RFP, RFQ, or EOI, your proposal must based on requirement, a specific requirement from your buyer. So having said that, it is a very important and the crucial element of analyzing RFQ or RDP in this instance. Because when you read it very carefully sometime if they're talking about the small item, RFQ, you may have like a 20-page, 30-page RFQ. But if we have a multi-million dollar contract, now we're talking about RFP, or more than 100, sometimes 200 pages of RFP. So this is huge document, it is very exhausting experience to read through everything. So there is a certain mechanism how to analyze, how to assess your customer requirement. So you have to come up with the various mechanism and you list out all the checklist of whether you can provide a solution or the product for customer need. So that's very important. So you are writing proposal for customer, not for your company. Second element we have to understand very clearly is technical, the proposal itself. A lot of people use very difficult vocabulary and various sophisticated wording. If you look at any public procurement documentation, what I mean by that most of the UN documentation for the proposal is all written in English. Sometime you may have a French, but if you do not understand a French, trying to submit proposal with translated version in English, it can be very dangerous. You better have a first language. If you have capability to understand French without relying on translation into English, you may have a very strong chance to getting more. But if you do not have that language especially in the written English for RFP you may better off not to depending on their chances. When you read the technical paper, you have to use a very plain and simple English easy to understand. Whether you use very sophisticated vocabulary trying to demonstrate how much you know, it is not going to fly very well. As long as you comply with specification, you comply with all of evaluation factor, evaluation criteria, you better use plain English easy to understand so the contracting officer get very clear, simple, distinctive message for what you're offering on the table. Third element of the preparing proposal is that you're writing the technical proposal and also the pricing portfolio for contracting officer. Contracting officer normally do not evaluate alone. I have not seen that often, unless it is very small like a micro purchase, less than few thousand dollars. UN may have a shopping without putting any advertisement, but most case, even without FQ, any decent amount with $100,000 plus, they may have committee number of people evaluating your tender. Therefore, it is not single person-based evaluation. What I'm trying to say here is UN Public Procurement is transparent. There's a lot of credibility issue in here that's why UN may give you a very good opportunity to participate because everything that UN Procurement does, it's open, transparent, and then everything is very clear, and finishing procedure well protected. Therefore, if you are trying to rely on some personal contract or some other irregular contract hoping that that contract will give you something different, different benefit, this is not the UN you can expect from it. It will be very fair, they will have a number of different people at the committee member evaluating based on evaluation criteria stipulated in the contract or stipulated in the RFP. That's how they evaluate. UN has very different concept of evaluation. For example, if UN want to buy office furniture, only giving you the example, so if the Country A pricing either $1,000 for the office furniture and Company B is offering 1,500. In reality, normal circumstance, the $1,000 will have upper hand and most likely to win the bidding, but what UN does, normally they have a less slightly different way, they will conduct the evaluation on technical paper first. If you do not need their technical criteria, whatever price you have, you may not have any chance to re-evaluate for your pricing. That mean pricing evaluation will not come before technical evaluation will be done. Also they will have a look at what would they call cost of ownership. Even if your price is $1,000, it sounds cheaper than Company B 1,500, but overall life cycle of that particular product, they will evaluate, add all the cost of ownership, cost of having the particular furniture, if the cost of having the furniture broke down, all the defect, all the problem area, at the end of that costing a lot more than $1,000, that mean Company B offering $1,500 may have upper hand winning the contract. When you have any opportunity and you have to look at UNGM and there's a number of literature about the UN Public Procurement guideline, you should read it in detail and understand very well before you're submitting any proposal in that regard. We talked about overall step procedure, how you prepare the proposal to UN. Then next week we're going to talk about more specific issue for UN Public Procurement and item in the country at distribution, which country does the best, why are they doing the best, what can we do about it. Thank you very much.
