Competitive tendering in the Scottish National Health Service Was it compulsory, and did it make a difference?(*)

This paper examines the implementation of competitive tendering in the Scottish National Health Service. Data relating to cleaning, catering and laundering services-- the three services targeted for competitive tendering--are examined. Our analysis suggests that for the first four years the request to market test was largely ignored in Scotland. In 1987 it become a management requirement, and within three years of its fresh start implementation of this policy more than matched the corresponding experience in England.

Tender Evaluation for the Telecommunication Industry using the Analytic Network Process

In the past few decades, tender evaluation has consistently dominated most of organizations\u27 top strategic priorities. Additionally, the field of tender evaluation has generated a vast amount of research efforts, wherein most of these efforts center on methods enabling consideration of all affecting criteria together to make an appropriate decision. Despite the great deal of advances in the methods of tender evaluation based on technical view, there still lacks comprehensive and organizational-driven decision making tools to support organizations during the crucial task of choosing a suitable tender that best meets their business and technical needs.;Tender evaluation has a strategic role in the success of large enterprises in the telecommunication market. It is a complex, multi-person, multi-criteria process. The criteria used to evaluate a tender contain quantitative which are easy to measure and qualitative attributes which most available methods fail to deal with them. In this study, a model is developed using Analytic Network Process (ANP) in a Benefit, Opportunity, Cost, and Risk (BOCR).;The essence of this approach is decomposition of a complex problem into a hierarchy with objective at the top of the hierarchy, criteria and sub-criteria at levels and sub-levels of the hierarchy, respectively, and decision alternatives at the bottom of the hierarchy. Factors at given hierarchy level are compared in pairs to assess their relative preference with respect to each of the factors at the next upper level. These can support complex problems that would be otherwise difficult to handle. This method is capable of handling discrete criteria of both quantitative and qualitative in nature and provides complete ordering of the alternatives.;The primary feature of this methodology is its ability to simultaneously consider all types of criteria for tender evaluation in telecommunication companies. The criteria defined for the model using Delphi method from experts in the field and are general to all telecommunication tenders. The developed model is used in an empirical study on an ongoing tender in a mobile telecom service provider company to analyze the tenderers\u27 data and evaluate and rank them. The result of this model is compared to the company\u27s evaluation result which is obtained from traditional Texas Instruments Matrix method. The proposed model shows the ranking of the tenderers in different BOCR merits separately as local priorities to help the evaluators make a more efficient decision. A sensitivity analysis on the empirical study was conducted to show how the rankings of the tenderers are changing by changing the weights of the BOCR merits.;The research work presented here may be used by telecommunication professionals and managers to aid in making appropriate decisions on tender evaluation process and determinate strategies for reducing the risk of this process

Developing anti-bribery organization system based on quantitative pair-wise information: an approach based on activity theory

Nowadays an important issue, for an organization is to be able to implement relevant anti-bribery risk management systems with mandatory laws. Managers strive to reach an equilibrium between a pure mandatory rule oriented organization and people freedom of choice to mitigate bribery on organization. The problem is how to develop and manage efficiently anti-bribery system in an organization without putting at risk its day by day operation. They are concerned how to balance between deep control and flexible way of people work on organization. The purpose of this document is to introduce a decision-making way of defining a context to establish an anti-bribery risk management system in accordance with the best practices. To address this matter, we will support our work in a theoretical framework for the analysis of human work and introduce anti-bribery as non-functional requirement (generic qualities of services) of organization information systems.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Tender evaluation methods in construction projects: A comparative case study

A review of tender evaluation practices from around the world revealed the inadequacy of the ‘lowest bidder’ criterion for contractor selection. In response to this inadequacy, many countries have introduced qualifications to this cri terion and established procedures for the evaluation process. The objective of the qualifications is to select a suitable contractor whilst fostering compet itiveness. Using a multi criteria decision making (MCDM) approach, the study identified eight contractor attributes from the literature, which are thought to be indicators of contractors’ capability to execute a contract and meet certain project specific criteria. Employing a case study project, the tenders of eight contractors short listed for the project were evaluated with the attributes using the “lowest bid”, multi attribute analysis (MAA) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methods. The results showed that the two multi criteria decision making methods indicated the selection of contractors other than what the ‘lowest bidder’ criterion indicated. Comparing the results of the MAA and AHP meth ods, it is evident that the two methods differed very little in their ranking of the contractors. This implies that the more complex nature of AHP and the extra efforts it requires have only a minor influence on the final ranking of contrac tors and seems to suggest that the extra cost of using AHP is not justified

A Decision Support System for Planning And Design Tender Selection in Public Buildings

This paper presents an integrated system in which a knowledge-based decision support system (DSS) for selecting planning and design (P&D) tenders in public building construction. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method is used to determine the weightings for evaluation criteria among decision makers and Fuzzy Multiple Criteria Decision Making (FMCDM) is dealt with the subjectivity and vagueness in the tender selection process. A case study consisting of nine alternatives, solicited from a public works agency in Taiwan, illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach and developed system

Grid Scale Battery Energy Storage Investment Potential - Analysis and Simulations of Frequency Control Markets in Germany and the UK

The need for energy storages in future power systems is acknowledged both in literature and in industry. Simultaneously battery energy storage technologies, especially Lithium-ion, are seen technologically relatively mature with favorable cost development. Whereas frequency control markets provide exploitable commercial and technical framework for battery investment. Nevertheless, true commercial viability is still uncertain in leading European markets in Germany and the UK. The purpose of the study was to provide complete and comparative market analysis and demonstrated prospective investment profitability outcomes for grid scale battery energy storages in Germany and the UK. In addition, the study aimed to show required conditions for desired investment performances. The study explored investment potential in primary frequency control market in Germany and enhanced frequency response market in the UK by analyzing market attractiveness from multiple aspects. The countries were ranked based on the analyzed aspects by Analytical Hierarchy Process. Finally, financial Monte Carlo investment simulations with revenue and cost uncertainties were performed. Simulations also provided required conditions for profitability. Analyzed data was based on historical market data, performed online market research and literature. Key findings of the study revealed that the chosen markets form suitable commercial framework for battery investments, but Germany shows clearly higher potential. However, the potential was questionable since both markets face significant challenges especially in financial sense. The concerns were confirmed by the simulations which suggested around 1–5 % and -3–3 % internal rate of return levels for Germany and the UK respectively. In addition, reaching 6 % return was seen very challenging whilst over 10 % return levels seemed unrealistic in the UK and extremely optimistic for Germany. The overall conclusion was that battery energy storage investment in either of the markets cannot currently be justified primarily by financial returns but needs strategic support.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Application of integrated fuzzy VIKOR & AHP methodology to contractor ranking

Contractor selection is a critical activity, which plays an important role in the overall success of any construction project. The implementation of fuzzy multiple criteria decision attribute (MCDA) in selecting contractors has the advantage of rendering subjective and implicit decision making more objective and transparent. An additional merit of fuzzy MCDA is the ability to accommodate quantitative and qualitative information. In this paper, an integrated VIKOR–AHP methodology is proposed to make a selection among the alternative contractors in one of Iranian construction industry projects. In the proposed methodology, the weights of the selection criteria are determined by fuzzy pairwise comparison matrices of AHP

Reflectance Adaptive Filtering Improves Intrinsic Image Estimation

Separating an image into reflectance and shading layers poses a challenge for learning approaches because no large corpus of precise and realistic ground truth decompositions exists. The Intrinsic Images in the Wild~(IIW) dataset provides a sparse set of relative human reflectance judgments, which serves as a standard benchmark for intrinsic images. A number of methods use IIW to learn statistical dependencies between the images and their reflectance layer. Although learning plays an important role for high performance, we show that a standard signal processing technique achieves performance on par with current state-of-the-art. We propose a loss function for CNN learning of dense reflectance predictions. Our results show a simple pixel-wise decision, without any context or prior knowledge, is sufficient to provide a strong baseline on IIW. This sets a competitive baseline which only two other approaches surpass. We then develop a joint bilateral filtering method that implements strong prior knowledge about reflectance constancy. This filtering operation can be applied to any intrinsic image algorithm and we improve several previous results achieving a new state-of-the-art on IIW. Our findings suggest that the effect of learning-based approaches may have been over-estimated so far. Explicit prior knowledge is still at least as important to obtain high performance in intrinsic image decompositions.Comment: CVPR 201