Project Background

Both European and German law forbids the use of brand names in the scope of public tenders. This is a result of European anti-discrimination policy pursuant to the framework of the 93/36/EEC Council Directive from 14th June 1993, and implemented as Section 8 VOL/A; it is designed to guarantee that certain manufacturers or vendor’s are precluded as potential bidders due to discriminatory wording.

Wording documents for official tenders is not an easy task, especially not in the field of procurement of information and communications technology (ICT): the technical complexity of the material, the quick succession of product cycles, and above all the problem of describing the required system performance in a precise manner taking all of your technical requirements into consideration are often a major challenge to purchasers in public offices. This is why product and service descriptions have often relied on well-known proprietary product names.

The aim of this website is to give authorities support for wording in official tenders for the procurement of information and communications technologies in a non-proprietary manner, i.e. in a way that avoids the use of proprietary brand names or referring to specific manufacturers, while taking state-of-art technical requirements into consideration. To fulfil legal requirements, this approach leverages general accepted benchmarks as a major element of a non-proprietary product description. The current focus is on the procurement of desktop PCs and notebooks with servers to follow next year.

Energy efficiency and environmentally friendly, sustainable procurement are becoming increasingly important. This is why the recommendations will also take these aspects into account.

German and European legislature contains a huge volume of mandatory, legal, and regulatory requirements that procurement officers must comply with. Again, these topics are detailed and discussed in an understandable manner.

The website “ITK-Beschaffung.de” project was founded as a joint initiative by the German Ministry of the Interior’s Procurement Office, and the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media  (BITKOM). Joint partners in the project are the German Army’s Federal Office for Information Management and Information Technology and the German Ministry of the Environment. To achieve mutual objectives, the project relied on intensive cooperation with experts from companies in the ITC industry.

To reflect the current state-of-art at all times, the recommendations listed here, are reviewed and – if necessary – updated at regular intervals.