e-Tendering with Web Services: A Case Study on the Tendering Process of Building Construction

The tendering process is a key business process that helps businesses find a suitable contractor. In the building and construction industries, clients invite tenderers to submit an estimate of prices, detailing the costs associated with completing a building. In this way, the client can base their decision on the result of the tenders to select the most suitable contractor. Currently in Hong Kong, many of such tendering processes are still mainly manual and paper based. The tenderers need to collect the tender's booklet, price it, and bring it back to the client's office before the deadline. In this paper, we present a design and implementation of an e-tendering system by using Web services for the automation of such tendering processes. We also show how e-tendering reduces the problems that occur in the manual process.