Govt suppliers flock to ‘ePerolehan’

PETALING JAYA: Some 30,000 of the existing 35,000 Government suppliers have registered to use the ePerolehan electronic procurement system currently being implemented.

"This 86% of the supplier base will be at the forefront of interacting with the Government through the system," said Commerce Dot Com Sdn Bhd chief executive Datuk Mohd Salleh Masduki.

Commerce Dot Com is the company in charge of putting in place ePerolehan, which is a component of the Multimedia Super Corridor Electronic Government Flagship application.

Once fully up and running, local and foreign suppliers will only be able to do business with the Government via the system.

To be completed in three phases, ePerolehan is currently in the second phase of development, according to Commerce Dot Com.

The first phase involved the introduction of two modules — Central Contract and Supplier Registration modules — while the current phase will see the rollout of Direct Purchase, Quotation and Tender modules.

With the exception of the Supplier Registration module, the other modules correspond to the four modes of purchasing that the Government conducts for the procurement of goods and services.

Salleh said that nine pilot government purchasing centres — known as Pusat Tanggungjawab (PTJ) — are currently using the Central Contract module, with another 20 in the process of being hooked up.

"These are pilot PTJs, and as you would expect, we have only a small number of transactions going through them right now," he said, adding that there were only "89 approved requisitions so far."

According to Commerce Dot Com business operations vice-president Zaharin Ali, 117 Central Contract suppliers have signed up for ePerolehan while 226 pilot suppliers that will use the Direct Purchase module — which went live last week — have been registered.

He also said that the third phase rollout would involve linking up all 4,288 PTJs nationwide to ePerolehan, which Salleh said would be completed "in the next couple of years."

Zaharin said suppliers can expect to see the contract approval process to be speeded up and take maximum of only 14 days once ePerolehan is fully utilised, compared to the current average of 36 days under existing Government procurement procedures.

Commerce Dot Com has spent about RM70mil to implement the system, and expects to spend a further RM19.5mil on additional hardware and software, and on its data centre and disaster recovery centre.

While registration for ePerolehan can be done online, the company has also set up so called eP Shoppes and eP Service Points, which are basically service centres to help small- to medium-size enterprises that supply goods and services to the Government to connect to the system.

Salleh said a total of nine such facilities have been set up in the Klang Valley area. "We hope to have as many of these centres as possible," he said.