Dear Sir / Madam,

First of all, I have to admit that this is a very interesting business opportunity. 

I want to provide herewith some comments and will start with an advise about the use of this dialogue tool: 

It would be good to be able to download a complete set of documentation, which we vendors can read. The vendors may then reply in the sections foreseen and/or someone from Comdia / UNFCCC might, as kind of “moderator” move them into the correct sections, if necessary. 

Here we have to download 6 (?) PDF-files first and have to read the instructions in diverse sections of the web portal, this is complicated and time consuming.

Many “Consultancies” won’t spend much time to download so many files for this non-paid advise / dialogue, as you already might have noticed in the last 10 days. With this advise you might increase the number of replies from the market.

Some more comments:

My impression:

• Not one vendor can address all aspects.

• Value for Money: considering the rather high degree of specialization of these services, it is more cost effective to outsource these aspects, rather than hiring (various) internal experts.

• The market trend favors multiple vendors.

• There will only be sufficient competition expected due to a large contract value.

Up to 8 companies foreseen in parallel for any of the 5 sections, means 40 general contracts, probably not 40 general contractors, but each with 4 profiles = 320 different consultant rates.  That’s a challenge to manage.

This is more than the European Institutions awarded for the real large Billion frameworks supplying several organizations. UNFCCC won’t disclose the budget, I suppose. However there needs to be attractiveness to suppliers in terms of volume/ fees. You are running in a risk of no-show-up / no-knowledge / passive vendors.

In Consultancy the “lowest price” as award criteria is unusual. My experience with this lowest award criteria for any services starting from BSc-level aren’t good. 

Especially in such high-level consultancy requests the contracting authority should not hire the cheapest, when the skill-table and minimum years of experience are fulfilled. There are weighting-tables used in many internat. organisations which I would propose to use along with best price/quality method.

You should consider the ability to provide on/ near/ off-shore services, but then you will have 3x more rates, here 960 rates?!

Outsourcing to too many vendors creates extra management overhead and integration / hand-over issues that can add complexity and additional costs. A framework contract is a “marriage over a time period of  4-5 years” where the parties should act in a close relation / partnership, however with too many vendors you might never build-up and retain knowledge, and UN organisations and any internat. Orgs’ are rare and not comparable with other standard-businesses, this means you might pay the learning curves of Externals again and again.

From my market experience and based on the current market trends it is realistic selecting 2 to 4 potential suppliers whose characteristics match UNFCCC's needs and establishing framework agreements with them.

A well-defined / stable scope document and internal contact persons is important for any project / services. You will need to build up the capabilities needed to define, source and control each project through a pool of in-house staff, maybe supplemented by external consultants, operating under careful UNFCCC management. The services will have always to be under the supervision, control and authority of an official/staff member of the UNFCCC.

I can’t find information about the payment / contract methods, e.g. if

•             Time and Means orders (TM) 

•             Fixed Price orders (FP) 

•             Quoted Time and Means orders (QTM)

Also the possibility that the client might decide about a downgrade to a lower profile (after offer and selection?) isn’t appealing: “The consultants offered in a given category must fulfill all the requirements and have all the competencies indicated. If only some requirements are met, the consultant will be placed in the appropriate lower category until all requirements for the higher category are met in full.”

In such cases, you should please discard the proposed candidate when not meeting the tendered requirements; this would further be necessary to ensure proper and fair competition, because lowest cost will win, the acceptance of a lower skilled profile then tendered would harm the fair competition principle.

Depending on the work-load, you could make use of the UNO - International Contracts to find suitable consultants, where the high level requirements to participate for companies in the upcoming CFTs won’t apply, while in Consultancy business the personal experience and qualification matters, even more when you won’t plan to hire large teams for long-term. Bodyshopping is in Consultancy very popular and many of the Big-4 place large teams on client sites.

I am missing some popular buzzwords what I have noticed in comparable “CAS – Consultancy –Audit – Study contracts” where they demand to guide/coach Senior Mgmt, conducting internal audits, support Enterprise Architecture / Enterprise Security, but maybe I haven’t noticed them.

Wish you good luck,

-------------------------------

Beste Grüße, Best regards,

Stefan Zündorf, Geschäftsführer

infom consulting GmbH

Pfarrer-Stortz-Str. 36, D-66399 Mandelbachtal

Registered in Saarbrücken HRB 102322, VAT-ID-Nr: DE299718630

eMail: stefan.zuendorf@infom-consulting.de

mobile: +49 (0) 160 - 7572506, phone +49 (0) 6803 -9943303

url: www.infom-consulting.de

http://lu.linkedin.com/in/stefanzuendorf

Overall, the description of the conditions for particpations are clear.

However, there are some points of concern:

1) Section "Economic and financial capacity" requires a solvency ratio of 10% for evidencing such capacity. It is questionable if solvency requirements are necessary and useful in this case: The framework agreements will contract the provision of assessments and other expertise, but will not trust any UNFCCC assets for administration or equivalent. Ensuring that legal capital requirements are met and the applicant is not subject to any bankruptcy proceedings at the time of submitting the bid may be more useful, hence. 

2) Section "Economic and financial capacity" furthermore requires the statement of service-specific turnover. It would be helpful to specify if a certain minimum amount of past service-specific turnover will be expected or if UNFCCC also accepts new and/or small consultancy companies to participate in the bid.

3) Section "Technical capacity" explains the criteria for invitation of bidders. These criteria imply at present that size of turn-over and staff have a weight of 45%. This approach may result in discrimination of smaller companies. As UNFCCC is considering contracting up to 8 companies per partial agreement, UNFCCC may also consider to use size clusters in evaluating bidders and in rewarding framework contracts. 

4) Section "Award criteria" explain that award criterion is "lowest cost". The criterion, however, should be "best value of money", taking into account not only the bid price, but the bunch of offer details (e.g. available expertise, availability of consultants etc.)