This is the first news article I have come across regarding to status of the CSC tender, not very encouraging. The article claims bidders all failed on certain unspecified specifications and will have one opportunity to address the issues. Failure to do so means disqualification. This could be due to unrealistic Canadian specifications. Unrealistic Canadian specifications is what destroyed the Canadian designed JSS project and continues today with design changes requested for the Berlin design the government selected for our AORs.
It is not impossible that none of the bidders will be 100% complaint resulting in either a degrading of the specifications likely resulting in litigation, delay, and worse, a new tender. Thus the fluster cuck procurement continues to rule the day.
The article also confirms only three bids were received. Assuming technical issues are resolved, an winner won't be decided upon until later this year and financial details still need to be agreed to. I guess Nov-Dec if things are resolved. Realistically, wait for the announcement of a new tender, junior has spent all our money. Team FREMM will be back in the game, perhaps others as well, and the 15 ships will become 10 or less. Then again, maybe bidders will say "screw this".
New Canadian warship project off to rocky start as bidders fail to meet some requirements
To be honest, I'm not surprised that there were failures all round in the first pass. The important thing, which is not stated, is which of the bids had the more serious breaches of compliance - and therefore more difficult to resolve.
There's a long way to go then if they're only up to the "cure" phase. The long winded procurement process for CSC is stated below:
The first stage is a completeness check where bids will be reviewed to ensure that they are complete and nothing has been missed.
The first pass of true evaluation comes in Stage 2.
In this Stage bids will be evaluated with respect to the Technical (how well the proposals meet Canada’s technical requirements) and Value Proposition (the quality of the bidder’s commitments to bring benefits to Canada and to incorporate Canadian content into the CSC design) elements of their bids.
During this evaluation bidders will need to demonstrate compliance with the identified Mandatory Compliance criteria and conformance with the other required criteria. Bids will be scored in accordance with the Evaluation Plan.
Again in the interests of maximizing the competition we will give any bidder that has not demonstrated compliance or conformance an opportunity to fix their proposal, a process we refer to as the Cure Process. This Cure process will be conducted in the following manner:
The evaluation teams will then do the required re-evaluations based on the updated bids
- As evaluation teams complete each section of evaluation, feedback will be provided to each of the bidders regarding their bid. This feedback will explain what areas of the bid were found to be non-compliant or non-conformant and why. Bidders will be able to ask questions regarding the feedback they receive
- Once all the sections of Technical and Value Proposition evaluation are completed and the final feedback has been provided to bidders the Final Submission Deadline will be established and communicated to bidders This date will be at least 4 weeks after the final feedback. During this period Canada and Irving Shipbuilding will respond to any questions asked regarding the bid feedback provided
- On the Final Submission Deadline bidders will need to resubmit the affected portions of their bids and will need submit their financial proposals
There will only be one pass through the Cure Process. Any bidder that is still deemed non-compliant with any of the identified Mandatory Compliance criteria after the Cure Period will be eliminated from the competition.
If at least one bidder is compliant and has demonstrated conformance with all the other required criteria then those bidders’ scores will be considered final and the evaluation process will continue with Stage 2 score weighting using these scores. In this scenario any non-conforming bid will be set aside.
However, if after the Cure Process none of the compliant bidders have demonstrated full conformance with all the required criteria then non-conformance adjustments will be made to each of the compliant bids’ corresponding technical risk scores and the evaluation process will continue with Stage 2 score weighting using these adjusted scores.
The resultant Stage 2 scores of compliant bids will be weighted 75% Technical /25% Value Proposition (the highest Value Proposition weighting to date) and the top 2 bids (plus any that are very close) will move on to the next stage of evaluation.
The other bids will be set aside.
Those bids that have passed through will be scored for the remaining evaluation elements of Design Maturity, Software Capability and Financial. Each bid’s raw scores for Technical and Value Proposition from the earlier stage will be retained and reweighted.
All the Stage 3 scores will be weighted and added together to get the bidder’s Total score. The final weightings will be Technical 42%, Value Proposition 15%, Design Maturity 19%, Software 1%, and Financial 23%.
Speaking notes for National Shipbuilding Strategy technical briefing on Canadian Surface Combatant request for proposal – National Shipbuilding Strategy – Sea – Defence Procurement – Buying and Selling – PSPC
Edit: added quote section
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