How to choose the right contractor? This question has made spill rivers of ink and endless meetings in many companies.
At one end of the arc will be the search for efficiency, flexibility and speed of management. The procedure here is to choose between few known and proven quality providers, interact with them, ask for prices, costs and conditions, even redefining the scope or the same project, until reaching the best decision. It implies great confidence in the managers.
At the other extreme is the procedure perfectly traceable and auditable internally and by partners that guarantees the less room for any corruption practice.
It is necessary to follow a strict default protocol, automated to a degree where there is almost no room for decisions that can be arbitrary, at the discretion of the contracting part. The biddings will be published in newspapers and the Internet and any company will have the possibility of presenting an offer.
This second method is preferred by state agencies, which reduces, although never to zero, the risk of corruption, but has some drawbacks:
- Creates a certain risk of wrong decisions
- It involves a much greater amount of working hours
- Takes a lot more time to get to the final decision.
- Low flexibility when project changes (which always happens)
- It’s usually very expensive
Between these two extremes there are a number of intermediate options where most companies are located. In general, the more closely to the state government these companies are, the closer they are to the second extreme, and the smaller and more informal and more trusting in their people, they will be closer to the first.
In the years of development of the Brazilian Subsalt, half of all drilling rigs in the world deep-water offshore were contracted in Brazil, almost all by Petrobras. If the price of oil continues to go up a little further and Brazil’s recovery is consolidated, the situation could repeat.
For this reason, the news presented by Petrobras, last January 17th, has caused a change in the contracting method, moving the system to the greater bureaucracy corner of the arc. It is a logical response to the “Lava Jato”, the investigation that discovered huge cases of corruption in the award of Petrobras contracts.
Companies that want to sell to Petrobras will have to take into account these new rules. In this kind of procedure, it is easy for an offer to be discarded by an unimportant technicality, prices must meet the minimum specifications requested, as offering a higher quality product at a barely higher price can result in losing the bidding. In addition, the new procedure does not exclude the dangerous “reverse auctions”.
Although they are a lot on implementation uncertainties, it is already being implemented sequentially in some Brazilian states, to cover the entire country in April 2018.
So far it was already very difficult to prepare a tender meeting the labyrinthic requirements of local standards, which many claims to update and simplify. But the new rules will make selling to Petrobras two times more difficult and will require specialists and many hours of work.
Learn more at section /services oil & gas/
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