In 2012 we built the first Drupal 6 and CiviCRM website for PURCO SA.

Purchasing Consortium Southern Africa is a non-profit procurement consortium for the Higher Education sector in South Africa and Namibia. The Consortium represents every public University in South Africa, one in Namibia, half of South Africa's TVET and CET Colleges, four private Higher Education organisations and nine associated research and standards bodies.

The Consortium's core business is to leverage the collaborative buying power of their Members to manage tenders and negotiate shared procurement contracts. 

Our first project with PURCO SA back in 2012 was to produce a printed Sourcing Guide of products and services, and then to build them a new website. That first website system, subsequently entirely redeveloped, changed the trajectory of the Consortium.

Initially designed to provide a public facing web presence we quickly added new integrated functionality. CiviCRM captured the records of all member institutions and their staff, enabling PURCO SA to communicate with them using CiviMail. Then we added webform that enabled suppliers to register on the PURCO SA supplier and tender database. That functionality alone saved the organisation hundreds of man hours in manual data capture from previously hand delivered, emailed and faxed registration forms. The CiviCRM database currently comprises more than 70 000 organisation and individual records.

The next step was to build an online tender system to publish new tenders and enable bidders to buy and pay for tender documents online. Drupal provided the front end engine and CiviContribute managed the payments.

Contract Management quickly followed, using an adaptation of CiviMember to track contracts, and Drupal-Civi integration to give Members permissioned access to the contracts and supplier information.

Covid triggered a total realignment of the tender system and the business. Previously facilitating hand delivered tender bids, the website system had to quickly enable no-touch online submissions. It took a couple of weeks to set up a simple secure, integrated upload system that emulated to security and auditability benefits of hand delivery into locked physical tenderboxes. It simply allowed bidders to upload up to three zip files but it worked incredibly well

That first basic online bid submission facility heralded a major change in the PURCO SA business.

Today, running version 4 of that initial system, all tenders managed by PURCO SA are managed online, with no bids are submitted physically. The e-Tender system offers a fully functional online tender and contract management system from tender publication through to bid submission, online bid evaluation and subsequent contract awards. The change has saved thousands of hours of manual data capture and has changed the nature of people employed by the Consortium. 

In 2024 PURCO SA staff processed 28 tenders a month for 45 Member Institutions. Tenders fully managed from publication to online bid submission and evaluation increased from 36 in 2020 to 248 in 2024, a compound growth rate of 162.5%.

Since online payments were introduced in 2017 more than 22 000 tender documents have been purchased, with the transactions automatically invoiced and recorded against the suppliers' records.

The eTender system has recorded 4393 online submissions since 2021, with an average of 8 supplier bids per tender. The largest tender since inception of the system had 273 prospective bidders, with 187 submitted bids and more than a gigabyte of uploaded files.

In 2024 PURCO SA managed 726 contracts with 555 supplier partners; and their Members spent R3.1 billion through these contracts.