How to buy ten boxes of cotton wool and not make a mistake

The subject of public procurement is sometimes quite unusual. This is normal, just 44-FZ regulates every little thing, and the sanctions for not complying with the law are very severe. So various interesting cases pop up in open registries.



As a result, an open register of completed and upcoming purchases represents an inexhaustible source of creativity, in which you can find, for example, the task of manufacturing a “pilot plant for the extraction of gold from flue gases with a productivity of 500 cubic meters per hour” for the Amur Scientific Center of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Almost alchemy.



Today I will talk about unusual and interesting things that were acquired through electronic bidding. And let's talk about the fact that, despite all the advantages of an open system and tight control, sometimes suppliers do not bring exactly what customers expect from them.

Inventive suppliers

Always articulate your needs when placing TK for procurement. Sometimes suppliers may misunderstand you, and as a result, everything reminds me of an attempt to outwit a genie who tries to fulfill the formal requirements as incorrectly as possible. Like in a joke:



There is a man in the desert. Hot, thirsty, strength running out. Suddenly sees

Aladdin’s lamp is wallowing. A man grabbed a lamp, rubbed it, a genie appears from it

and says:

- Well, man, I will fulfill any desire.

- Genie, I want to go home.

- Okay, let's go.

- No, I quickly want.

- Well, then we ran.



Doctors, probably, especially strongly dislike excess bureaucracy, and so work with tons of paper documentation. Purchases of consumables and equipment now, on the one hand, have become much more honest and transparent, on the other hand, they have become more complicated from the point of view of TK. It is necessary to fully describe the required product and at the same time make sure that specific manufacturers have not been named in order to maintain fair competition. The whole problem is that some suppliers have an incredible imagination that allows them to win tenders without breaking a single point.



Suppliers are creative people. Many people think that they are engaged in the boring resale of goods from the warehouse to the final consumer. In fact, they are always ready to put their soul into the process and modify the product to the needs of the customer. For example, one laboratory ordered reagents. There were two options on the market at that time: the expensive foreign one that the customer wanted to purchase, and the cheaper domestic analogue. The formal characteristics on the packaging are identical. However, the customer in the purchase did not write that the bottles should have a volume of 250 ml (this is the volume of the foreign reagent). Our analog was bottled in 500 ml containers. The customer also did not indicate that the packaging should be factory. As a result, the cheapest supplier with a domestic analogue won the auction. He took on the difficult task of handicraft filling our reagent into 250 ml jars. Even the stickers were glued neatly.



In one of the dental clinics bought cotton. Balls and cylinders are wound from it to be used in treatment. It was a cursed position, and all doctors always with a slight trepidation expected that this time would be in the treasured boxes. The first surprise was that cotton wool is a peeled plant, cotton. Everything would be fine, but a specific batch of cotton wool contained simply an unrealistic amount of cotton seeds. As a result, the gloomy nurses were busy almost manually combing the fibers, and the patients spewed the seeds perplexedly. The second surprise was even more fun. Again, the cheapest supplier won the auction, but the new delivery was snow-white, smooth and beautiful cotton wool. And again everyone was delighted. The nurses rolled the cylinders, the dentists carefully inserted them into the patient’s mouth and watched in perplexity as the saliva neatly drained on completely dry snow-white cotton wool. In the description of the purchase, they omitted the clause that cotton should be made of cotton. Therefore, a smart supplier decided that synthetic wool made of hydrophobic fiber would be great too. You did not write that it should absorb saliva. But at least not glass wool.



The conclusion is simple. If you don’t care about the high-quality end result, you can order “Computer gray 10 pcs.”. But the result will be quite unpredictable. And you can spend enough time to create good TK, and the result will be exactly what you need. As a result, in the same polyclinic, for example, having clearly prescribed everything in the statement of work, we bought an excellent cone beam tomograph to replace the old film equipment.

If the purchase seems strange to you, then you simply did not understand it

Contrary to the opinion of many people, not only expensive things like a gas turbine power station are put up for purchase, but also very simple things. Sometimes very cheap. Just the law obliges. I was very pleased with the Museum of the History of Cosmonautics named after Tsiolkovsky in Kaluga. They purchased five items worth 40 rubles 65 kopecks. The museum’s curator explained: “The Kaluga branch of the Russian Post, together with our museum, issued an unmarked postcard with a photograph of Gagarin taken during his visit to Kaluga. We credited five to the museum fund. But under the law, we can only buy exhibits through official procurement. ”



Or, for example, in one of the regions, the education department eight years ago foresaw the future efforts of the Government of the Russian Federation to improve the fault tolerance of the Russian segment of the Internet and ordered "the provision of telepathic services to provide access to the Internet in 28 educational institutions." A typo, of course, but still.



In another region, the Republican Clinical Hospital needed to purchase chickens. Normal situation: patients need to be well fed so that they recover faster. Unfortunately, tired doctors apparently used the old template when filling out the application. As a result, four tons of “not used” chickens appeared in the wording of the competition. On the other hand, buying chickens that someone has already used before is also so-so entertainment.



In fact, if you search well, you can find many similar items that are incomprehensible at first glance. Well, why, for example, should the Ministry of Internal Affairs buy service deer ? And everything is simple. Criminals also happen to be in the tundra, but they will not succeed in catching up with them on conventional equipment through impassable thickets. People just do their difficult, but very necessary work. Even the amount of feed for them is regulated:

According to the regulatory framework, police camels are supposed to receive 2 kg of oats and 12 kg of hay per day, deer - 0.5 kg and 1 kg, respectively, donkeys - 1.2 kg and 2.8 kg. In addition, service deer must additionally receive per day: bread from a mixture of peeled rye and wheat flour of the 1st grade - 1 kg, moss moss - 6 kg.

And although not everyone can understand why anyone should buy such unusual things, we can be sure that we bought everything we needed for work as transparently and legally as possible.