Utilities in the European Union are subject to strict regulations if they want to place an order over threshold. Consequently each tender over the threshold must be published in the Supplement of the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU).
But this procedure costs a lot of time for the buying organisation – with the “open procedure” the buyer has to wait 52 days until the application documents have to be sent in. Even if it is the restricted procedure you have to wait 37 days. And once you have all application documents on your desk it is difficult to compare all suppliers because every applicant sent in different papers.
In order to save time and costs Connexio can be used as a qualification system and every utility is in line with the EU procurement legislation.
How does it work?
It’s simple. On your behalf Achilles publishes in the Supplement of the OJEU once a year that your organisation uses Connexio as a qualification system for specified products and/or services (CPV Codes) – each organisation that wants to supply your organisation with those products and/or services has to register with Connexio in order to pre-qualify and to comply with the criteria (Directive 2004/17/EC, Article 53). The publication of Connexio as a qualification system is accepted as a call for competition – you can either use the “restricted procedure” or the “negotiated procedure” which limits the time for the receipt of requests to participate. Once the notice is published and you waited 37 days you can always select organisations registered as pre-qualified suppliers in Connexio without any further publications of notices. In addition to that the standardised supplier information enables you to compare the selected suppliers much easier AND you are always in line with the EU procurement legislation. Hence you are always on the safe side.
Current EU-Notices - an overview
An overview of the EU-Notices, where connexio is used as the qualification system, can be found here