Helsinki’s procurement tool recognised for market potential

A project to find new climate solutions has also resulted in a procurement tool for cities.

Forum Virium, Helsinki’s city-owned innovation company, was struggling with increasingly complex tendering processes that could no longer be managed with existing systems. The organisation developed a procurement tool which has been recognised by the European Commission and is available as open source for other cities.

The system aims to make evaluation and comparison of proposals simple and includes visual overviews.

Kaisa Sibelius, a Project Manager at Forum Virium Helsinki, said the tool, which was developed in-house in a matter of weeks, helps with evaluating a large number of proposals and lowers the risk of making mistakes.

On the radar

Forum Virium’s application evaluator has been added to the European Commission’s data-driven Innovation Radar that recognises “cutting edge” innovations developed in EU-funded projects.

The Commission said the market creation potential of the tool is noteworthy, meaning it is innovative and addresses an unmet need.

Forum Virium has used the tool in the AI4Cities project, which aims to find artificial intelligence-based solutions to accelerate carbon neutrality.

Nearly 100 tenders were submitted by companies across Europe in the first open call, and in phases this has been whittled down to seven organisations that have entered the piloting phase in Helsinki, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Greater Paris, Stavanger and Tallinn.

Sibelius said: “The AI4Cities procurement process had three stages. The evaluation criteria and the group of the evaluators changed from stage to stage. We had need for a tool that allows quick and light access for the variable number of evaluators in different stages of the procurement process. Because the tool was easy to adopt, it lowered the evaluators’ hesitation to join the cause.”

She said that due to the large number of proposals in the first phase, the project team could not handle the evaluation with Excel spreadsheets as planned. The risk of mistakes was too great with dozens of people using the same table.

“We could not find any suitable ready-made tool to fulfil our needs,” she commented. “Luckily, we had in-house expertise to build the service in an agile way.”

Adaptable

Sibelius noted the solution, which is available in GitHub, is very adaptable and can be modified to meet other cities’ needs. Forum Virium plans to use it in more projects and further develop as needed.

“It definitely has potential to become a standard,” said Sibelius.

“If other cities start to develop and use this, it would be nice to hear about that and get more ideas for ourselves.”

The AI4Cities project is now drawing to a close and outcomes and takeaways will be shared later this month.