Where does ProZorro come from?
The ProZorro tendering system is entirely based on an e-procurement solution - OpenProcurement toolkit - the open-source bidding platform developed and implemented by the Quintagroup company. This platform was designed from scratch in 2014 inspired by the desire to provide transparent, corruption-free and efficient spending of the state budget. The system is developed in strong compliance with the new approach to the issues of consistency of procurement procedures, evaluation of the tender proposals, transparency and public control of procedures and information. Among the most common procuring entities using ProZorro, there are the Ministry of Infrastructure, the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Economy, the State Management of Affairs, the Ministry of Ecology, and many others.
ProZorro’s unique features
The efficiency of the reverse English auction
The bidding process in ProZorro is streamlined with the help of the reverse English auction in which the procurement entity functions as an auctioneer while the potential service or goods suppliers participate as bidders. The number and the duration of the auction rounds are limited and machine-controlled, making the tendering process quick, fair and competitive.
However, the OpenProcurement’s auction module also allows for the utilization of other auction types with the application of any preferable limitations and settings. For further reading on this topic, please move to the auction module description.
The network of third-party brokers in ProZorro
First of all, the OpenProcurement toolkit was designed for ProZorro keeping in mind the aim to make public procurement software as open as possible. Therefore, the tendering process had to take place through the involvement of a great number of suppliers by establishing connections with third-party brokers - the platforms providing the users with access to the system. ProZorro architecture is designed to provide cross-access to the system. This way, the procuring entities are able to create tenders using any authorized third-party electronic platform, and the suppliers can register their bid proposals similarly, for any procurement procedure, regardless of the platform where the proposal was first announced. In addition, competition between the electronic platforms will lead to procurement service improvement. With only 7 platforms participating in the network from the project start, 20 brokers are currently providing access to the system. What is more important, the project is open, so any electronic platform (broker) can still join if it provides the necessary functionality.
OCDS compliance
OpenProcurement’s Data Standard was harmonized with Open Contracting 1.0RC. The Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) is designed to ensure the proper and unified organization of data in the process of e-contract signing. Since e-contracts are an important part of the procurement procedures, it was considered reasonable to develop the OCDS API for ProZorro. This way, all the procurement-related information becomes sharable, reusable and machine-readable giving the public more opportunities for thorough analysis, deeper insights and more control over the tendering process.
Availability and scalability
The system architecture can be placed in 3 or more data centers (availability zones), with the preservation of work capacity in case of loss of less than half of data centers (1 out of 3 or 2 out of 5). Initially, ProZorro was hosted on Amazon Web Services, but according to the Ukrainian laws, it had to be stored in the Ukrainian data centers. So in 2017-2018, our DevOps team migrated all ProZorro data (50TB of open data, 30M files) and components to the Ukrainian data center Denovo. What is more, the system allows users to "horizontally" increase the ability to process transactions by launching additional servers that control business logic and data quality.
Performance guarantee
The system lays down an architectural limit on the number of database queries that can be made during transaction processing, which allows for predictable scaling of system performance.
All business processes that require more database queries to maintain a performance guarantee are carried out by individual internal components of the system which are operating in asynchronous mode.
The OpenProcurement toolkit’s code is open source and free, stored on Github: github.com/openprocurement. The documentation can be very useful for the introduction. This solution is continuously tested and used in various areas of public procurement.
Awards and recognition
Ukrainian Prozorro reform has won the World Procurement Award (WPA) 2016 at Public Sector Awards in London, on May, 18 for design and implementation of an e-procurement system with unique architecture and philosophy.
Prozorro has received the distinguished international award - the annual prize of the Open Government Awards 2016 - during the Global Summit in Paris, France on December 7. Ukraine also gained special recognition for the involvement of youth in the project.
ProZorro was shortlisted during two nominations for the World Procurement Award. Also, it became a showcase for the Open Contracting Partnership, a collaborative effort by the World Bank that promotes interest, openness and participation in public contracting.
