Developing and Drafting Solid Procurement Documents and Evaluating Bids

Tuesday, June 28 to Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Crowne Plaza Château Lacombe, Edmonton, AB

TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 2011 

8:00 Registration Opens and Coffee Served

9:00 Opening Remarks from the Course Leaders

Paul Emanuelli
General Counsel & Managing Director, The Procurement Office

Judy L. Wilson
Partner, Blake Cassels & Graydon LLP

MODULE 1 DefiningThe Parameters Of Your Sandbox

9:30 Focussed Supply Market Analysis to Improve Value for Money

Paul Marc Frenette
Partner, Deloitte & Touche LLP

Conducting supply market analysis at the outset of your projects is crucial to developing effective procurement strategies and to better managing supply-related risks. In this session, you will gain the skills necessary to demonstrate high-level business acumen to potential suppliers and get the best value from all your deals.

• Checklist for creating and implementing a formalized system to track and rate suppliers
• Optimizing proven techniques to rate performance
• Developing knowledge of market economics and drivers to deliver cost, value and improved risk management
  • What factors can influence and impact supply?
  • How is bargaining power affected?
  • Conducting assessments of past, current and future market trends to re-align business practices
• Identifying and evaluating Key Performance Indicators beyond traditional financial metrics, including customer satisfaction indices such as:
  • On-time deliveries
  • Supplier defect rate
  • Procurement cycle time
• Maximizing online resources to assist in comparing scores and obtaining feedback from your peers

Case Study: Foundational Principles in Supply Market Analyses

The session leaders will guide you through the building block principles that form part of every good market research project. You will learn the hallmarks of a good organizational structure and how it can lead to a clear competitive advantage.

11:00 Networking Refreshment Break

11:15 Managing your Requirements under the Lowered Trade Barriers of the New West Partnership Trade Agreement

Lorraine Andras
Associate Director, Trade Policy – Domestic,
Alberta International & Intergovernmental Relations

Brenda C. Swick
Partner, McCarthy Tétrault LLP

Paul V. Stocco
Partner, Brownlee LLP

The new business registry system currently in place between British Columbia and Alberta will be extended to Saskatchewan by July 1, 2012. Companies that do not know the intricacies of the NWPTA may miss out on procurement opportunities. Th is session will equip you with the tools necessary to optimize the lowered procurement thresholds for Saskatchewan entities, and to meet your obligations in a multi-Agreement environment.

• Overview of the underlying principles, including:
  • Who and what is covered by the NWPTA?
  • What are the procurement thresholds?
  • What should be considered to calculate value?
  • Identifying and adopting the exceptions to and exclusions from the NWPTA
• Understanding the anticipated NWPTA common procurement policy
• Securing the best vendors and suppliers: How does the NWPTA affect preferential purchasing policies?
• Managing the overlapping requirements between the NWPTA, NAFTA, AIT, and the CUSPA

12:15 Networking Luncheon for Delegates and Speakers

MODULE 2 Drafting Exercises: Practical Skills Training to Get it Right the First Time

1:30 Writing with Clarity: Plain Language Drafting Skills for RFXs

Paul Emanuelli
General Counsel and Managing Director
The Procurement Office

• What are your obligations under the plain language drafting requirements , and the legal implications for failure to comply?
• Knowing your target audience: Strategies to tailor your writing to suit the ability and knowledge level of the reader
• Critically analyzing the technicalities of writing, including:
  • Overview of the fundamentals of drafting
  • Grammatical structures to avoid
  • Factors to consider in creating a blueprint for documents that facilitate full comprehension of the contents
• Key Words and Grammatical Structures for Convincing and Easy to Read RFX Text

2:30 Developing, Drafting and Amending Solid Procurement Documents to Refresh Your Template Bank

Paul Emanuelli
General Counsel and Managing Director
Th e Procurement Office

Lisa J. Stiver
Thompson Dorfman Sweatman LLP

The legal and financial risks inherent in ignoring changes in the law and having non-compliant documents are too high. In this session, you will gain practical drafting strategies to bolster your drafting skills to prepare key procurement documentation and minimize the serious operational, financial, legal, contractual and reputational risks of weak documentation.

• Specifications: Establishing a clear and comprehensive scope to the procurement process will enable you to obtain goods or services at the most economical cost and to invite maximum competition.
• Statements of Work: SOW’s are inherently complex and are unique to each contract. They can vary significantly depending on the type of work required, the duration and other significant factors, but there are few clear rules or standards to define the parameters of a good SOW. In this exercise, you will review solid SOWs and learn how to incorporate them into your procurement projects.
• Case Study: The competitive procurement cycle for a unique purchase can be facilitated by a negotiable competitive document. User centric guides facilitate the alignment of client needs to the overall procurement document. A step by- step walk through of this approach will highlight the flexibility of this process.
• Addenda covering Clarifications and other changes: Work through the various methods of making changes to your procurement documents in this session. You will gain clarity on the format and content of addenda and other changes to procurement documents, in order to avoid unnecessary delays.
• Non-Legally Binding RFPs:
  • Refresher on the key document characteristics
  • Determining the limits of mandatory requirements: What contractual information should not be included and where do you have flexibility?
  • How to evaluate on top and how to allocate points while managing the hurdles of subjectivity

Networking Refreshment Break will be provided at 3:30.

4:45 Procurement Documentation in a Post-Tercon Environment: Legal Update

Paul D. Blundy
Partner, Bennett Jones LLP

• Refreshing your knowledge of Tercon: key principles in a nutshell
• How have the Tercon principles been successfully implemented? Examples of clauses upheld by the Courts
• Implications of recent case law on procurement decisions
• Managing legal risk by truly understanding the ramifications of bad drafting

5:30 Course Leaders’ Closing Remarks Conference Adjourns for the Day

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2011 | edmonton

8:00 Coffee Served

9:00 Opening Remarks from the Instructors

9:15 Deconstructing Non-Compliant Exclusion Clauses and Implementing Effective Solutions to Reduce the Risk of Litigation

Donald C.I. Lucky
Partner, Reynolds Mirth Richards & Farmer LLP

The language of your exclusion clauses directly impacts your risk of legal claims arising out of breach of a bid contract or duty owed to tenderers . In order to minimize and properly manage that risk. In this session, you will learn how to shore up your best defence and insulate your documents against the risk of a Tercon-style judgment.

• Specific wording that must be included in exclusion clauses
• Key considerations in drafting exclusion clauses and others, including:
  • Limitation of Liability, Privilege and Indemnity Clauses
• Overcoming common traps and pitfalls in boilerplate language: When can templates be effective, and how far will they take you?
• Future trends: Examining the permissibility of building a specific exclusion clause into the tender process applicable to suppliers with poor past performance ratings
• Drafting Exercise: Legally Binding Exclusion Clauses: In this breakout exercise, you will learn how to effectively and efficiently identify the characteristics of a compliant exclusion clause and how to break bad drafting habits.

10:45 Clarifying the Differences between Tenders and Binding or Non-Binding RFPs: How to Avoid Creating a Tender

Judy L. Wilson
Partner, Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP

Careful drafting is important in formulating RFPs in order to avoid crossing over into Tenders. The essential elements of both types of document must be at the forefront when drafting, and particularly when reviewing multiple bids for the same RFP. When making changes to your RFP, it is extremely easy to indirectly create a tender, thereby triggering your obligations of fairness and other tendering rules. This drafting exercise will teach you how to keep the two documents distinct and separate to preserve the integrity of your RFP and mitigate the risk of exposure to Contract A analysis.

11:15 Networking Refreshment Break

MODULE 3 Evaluating Bids: Playing within the Sandbox that you Have Created

11:30 Best Practices Guide on Procurement Bid Evaluation

Mark P. Kortbeek
Partner, Bennett Jones LLP

The evaluation process is key to ensuring that you have selected the right company for the job. This session will define the parameters for seamless evaluation, and allow you to make better business decisions with a view to protecting your company. Learn when and how to make changes to your process.

• Establishing a viable evaluation framework: Case Study
  • Timely management of all the players in a multi-stake holder environment
  • Meeting the needs of private sector clients while respecting and protecting the principles of fairness, transparency and accountability
• Creating criteria that is clear and fair to bidders
• Practical evaluation strategies to manage subjectivity while forging ahead with industry-wide standardization
• Best practices in quantification

12:30 Course Leaders’ Closing Remarks: Conference Concludes

12:45 Networking Luncheon for Delegates and Speakers Participating in the Master Class

Post-Course Master Class Assignment: Constructing and Implementing a Contract Management System and Quality RFP Drafting Procedures

June 29, 2011 | 2:00 – 5:00 pm

Master Class Instructor
Ashif Mawji
CEO, Upside Software Inc.

This is your opportunity to immediately put into practice the new skills learned throughout the course in a mock procurement exercise. The Master Class instructor will first guide you through the steps required to create and implement a successful contract management structure. You will then focus on ensuring that your RFPs are properly executed to fit within your newly established structure. You will leave this Class with the skills and confidence to master your very next RFP, and firm up best practices for all future procurement projects.

Instituting an Effective and Comprehensive Contract Management Structure

• Evaluating your unique workplace requirements
• Examining leading systems that excel in storing templates, tracking compliance with, and performance against, contracts and providing reminders for time sensitive matters
• Developing a shopping checklist to secure the best possible system to meet your needs

Drafting a Clear and Concise RFP that fits under your new Contract Management Structure

• Extracting the key information that you need from potentially overwhelming market analysis research
• Guidelines to incorporate the necessary clauses into the overall flow of your document, and keeping the focus on compliance, particularly for exclusion clauses

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Location:
Crowne Plaza Château Lacombe
Edmonton, AB