Is an e-auction just a way of finding the cheapest contract at the expense of quality?
No. A properly run e-auction will be conducted as part of a normal procurement exercise where unfit suppliers are excluded from the procurement (and hence e-auction) as part of the evaluation process. The evaluation process itself results in a quality score against each of the suppliers’ tenders. This is used to feed into the e-auction scoring mechanism alongside the suppliers’ price bids. The overall winner is the bidder offering the optimum combination of quality and price.
