Dohatec to build e-procurement system for Bhutan

A Bangladeshi software firm is set to develop an electronic government procurement (e-GP) system for Bhutan, which will have the capacity to handle 15,000 bids a year.

“We signed a deal with the Bhutanese government on Monday and work will start on January 26,” said Luna Shamsuddoha, chairman of Dohatec New Media, a software firm that also developed Bangladesh's e-GP system.

Dohatec has partnered with Bhutanese company New Edge Technologies to complete the work, she said. “We signed an eight-year contract with them and at least 10,000 bidders will use the system.”

It is prestigious for Bangladesh that Dohatec is competing with leading global IT solution providers, she said. Dohatec will replicate the Bangladeshi e-GP system in Bhutan.

“To get the Bhutanese contract, we competed with leading companies from India and other developing countries also.”

The company has been working on e-GP in Bangladesh for the last 12 years, she said.

In Bangladesh, the road transport and bridges ministry, water resources ministry, local government ministry and the Rural Electrification Board are using the system built by Dohatec.

At a meeting of Digital Bangladesh Taskforce in August, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina directed all ministries to start electronic bidding for public purchases by February. The taskforce led by Hasina is the highest policymaking body for digitisation of the country.

Since June 2011, 24,275 electronic procurements have been completed out of 41,389 tenders, according to Shamsuddoha. She hoped the system would ensure transparency in bidding.

Dohatec had earlier developed Bangladesh's voter identity registration and biometric matching system for eight crore people.

It also provided the Bangladesh army with voter enrolment and people's identification software in 2007. The prototype comprised digital voter entry forms, including photos and fingerprints.

Bangladesh Election Commission made the systems public in April 2007.

The company from its beginning has also been supporting the birth and death registration project of the government.

In 2001-02, Dohatec developed the United States Postal Service's online mail-tracking system with Harte-Hanks Inc.

Dohatec's online mail-tracking system is a fully web-enabled database system capable of handling millions of records in a barcode system.

Dohatec has also been developing the World Bank's World Development Report every year since 2002. The content in the reports is fully indexed and cross-referenced for easy searching across the volumes in the archives.

Besides, Dohatec attracted attention from software giant Microsoft for its outstanding contribution to the hi-tech domain and became a Microsoft Gold Software certified partner in 2006.

Dohatec also worked with different companies in Canada, Germany and Switzerland.