MTender (Prozorro in Moldova) goes live

January, 2017

MTender, an e-procurement system in Moldova, goes live. MTender is a system of electronic public procurements, following the example of ProZorro, but with the OpenProcurement tailored to the legislation requirements of Moldova in its core.

As in Ukraine’s case, MTender was founded on three cornerstones: ‘everyone eyes everything’, the system is open-source, and its objective is to enhance transparency and accountability of public procurement in Moldova.

The eProcurement platform is built according to open data, open source and OCDS (Open Contracting Data Standard). It is built as hybrid multiplatform model, with multiple commercial platforms with equal access to the data stored in a government-operated central database.

As to data format, Prozorro is reused in the infrastructure provided by MCloud, national cloud service that is to be used to host the system. Since Prozorro was designed for hosting on Amazon Web Services, it implements S3 API. But MCloud is using an API incompatible with S3.

MTender is based on the following key concepts:

Multi-platform hybrid model. As it is envisioned in OpenProcurement system, several commercial platforms operators can communicate in real-time via a central unit with contracting entities and suppliers and the eGovernment services. Therefore, a short implementation period and free of charge access to eProcurement platforms for Contracting Authorities are achieved.End-to-end electronic public procurement. The e-procurement procedure covers all the stages of a public procurement process, from procurement planning to invoicing and payments under public contracts.Interoperable with eGovernment services. The eProcurement system is designed to ensure interoperability with existing and future eGovernment services and national public registers. As a result, the system possesses modern functionalities, without presenting huge risks, since eGovernment services have already been developed in Moldova.