The Process of Unit Price Extraction from Public Sector Contracts

Tomáš Bruckner,Filip Vencovský

doi:10.18267/j.aip.139

Abstract

Czech government institutions commissioned a research on extracting usual unit prices from public IT contracts to aid future public tender sizing. The goal of the project is to obtain millions of contracts from the public register, convert them to full text, extract unit prices from the text and publish a pricelist of IT industry manday prices. This paper designs the process and method of price extraction, demonstrates and evaluates the result on five iterations of extraction and discusses the experience of two years of project performance. The process is designed as a set of repeatable workflows and specified activity and role description. The method is designed as a combination of automated and manual actions. Due to the format and content variability of involved documents and the low mistake tolerance, the possibility of automated extraction of unit prices from full text contract is limited, and human workforce for validation is crucial.

Highlights

The major discussion of pretender estimation in academic literature is linked with building tenders (Aibinu & Pasco, 2008; Skitmore & Picken, 2000), the same issue applies to tenders in the Information technology (IT or ICT) area
IT or Information Systems contracts tendered by public institutions are sensitive with regard to correct sizing (Ochrana & Pavel, 2013), and public institutions often struggle with the need of usual price determination before any public tender
A public institution usually sets the price with the help of a counsellor, who uses several demonstrably negotiated contracts and proves prices negotiated in a given time and place, as stated in (Czechia, 1990)

Summary

Introduction

The major discussion of pretender estimation in academic literature is linked with building tenders (Aibinu & Pasco, 2008; Skitmore & Picken, 2000), the same issue applies to tenders in the Information technology (IT or ICT) area. IT or Information Systems contracts tendered by public institutions are sensitive with regard to correct sizing (Ochrana & Pavel, 2013), and public institutions often struggle with the need of usual price determination before any public tender. In IT and Information Systems contracts, such findings can vary considerably and are not very useful for contract sizing. This lead 13 public institutions to join in an attempt to create a broad overview of usual prices related to IT services, based on all contracts demonstrably negotiated by public institutions in the Czech Republic available in the public contract register (Czechia, 2015; Ministry of Internal Affairs, 2019b). The unit price has to be extracted using text mining techniques

Objectives

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Results