In point form, simply summarize key insights on barriers to participate in procurement from the below text at an 8th-grade reading level and provide brief supporting quotes with ID numbers:
0105: I think that there have been, through the exercise of creating our accessibility plan there’s been identification of some barriers that exist in our process. The ones that come top of mind are the type of forms that we use for RFPs and how the file types can create issues. Even just a general awareness of accessibility as a procurement issue has been a threshold for the organization in the last little while. There may be accessibility requirements with communication. Sometimes we’re asking for a product of some kind and we need that product to be accessible. Those are the types of considerations being addressed in our planning over the next few years.
0107: One barrier is that in my position relating to people with disabilities, I wasn’t aware of the procurement side of things and that’s a barrier. The lack of communication limits supplier diversity.
0109: Typical barriers related to size of businesses… the digitization of the procurement process has helped alleviate barriers related to paperwork (i.e. the physical burden)
0112: Because technology from some of our suppliers isn’t necessarily accessible, we can’t simply stop running the bank. Our ability to say “accessibility is a must” is limited, and in many places it becomes a “should.” We take a risk-based approach to these issues and sometimes that “should” becomes a “must” and sometimes it becomes a “what’s the best you’ve got.” Not everything that we’re going to get off the shelf is going to be accessible.
0114: We have very quick turnaround times to respond to RFPs. Often the process is quite slow so we’re trying to expedite it as much as we can. If you needed to take maybe a little bit longer and needed to take more breaks with your work. Responding to that RFP could definitely be challenging. Also particularly for contracts if we get to an interview stage after the RFP, that’s really highly valued so potentially if you had some sort of speech requirements, that would potentially put you at a disadvantage in our process.
0116: Even people who are normally abled have questions about the process but I’m sure there are issues for people with disabilities, but I’m not aware of any specific barriers.
0117: (More generally on systemic barriers in the organization) We’re too large, very complex. A Very strong, very large organization where it can easily be difficult to move things when you need to. From time to time people get used to having the same attitude, this is how we used to do things, keeping status quo. Technology is a big one as well, if all the requests you make are based on a particular technology and it’s not accessible to PWDs or a particular group of PWDs. It’s systemic, historical, and attitudinal.
0119: I think the barriers are the same for small businesses. We make sure it’s AODA compliant. I will say SAP Ariba is not compliant to AODA, it’s compliant to US accessibility requirements. Canada seems like it’s at the bottom of the list for these updates, so it’s not fully accessible. We’ve requested it but it still isn’t up to the Canadian standard. There are general barriers, and whenever you have a barrier, groups that are disenfranchised are going to find it harder than less disenfranchised people. They probably find the process difficult to navigate at times, but that would be any supplier, and small suppliers would find that hard. We do ask for bid bonds and performance securities and that’s all and up-front cost to the supplier, so if those costs are an issue there’s even more working with [Municipality].
0120: Not sure how accessible MERX platform is. For questions on bidding it may all be online, no telephone option. Company’s website goes down a lot and the banner across the top has tiny font.
0122: Within the organization I think we do a lot to accommodate and to keep it confidential. There’s a wide range of disabilities and they don’t have to be purely physical or obvious. I think that disabled owned businesses would face the same problems that any small business would face. Lack of knowledge of procurement processes, lack of understanding of how public procurement is carried out. Maybe a little more hand holding is required. Some of my colleagues work with mom and pop shops who don’t even have email, it’s challenging when everything is going digital. They might be in locations that struggle to even have internet, so it’s sort of making it a little bit more fair and putting all on the same standing ground.
0126: Definitely needing more time, but not with any rationale (which is normal) as in they don’t need to explain why they need more. That’s relatively common, you put something out and they’ll request an extension., Anything I’ve run then if it’s reasonable (as in there’s no good reason to deny it on our end) then we accommodate that. I have had small businesses bring up technology barriers super recently. Being able to address our requirements for cyber security as a small business was flagged. I would say that I’m not sure the request was unreasonable, but it was quite stringent compared to industry maybe outside of government. I’m not a subject matter expert on how reasonable it was but I did challenge it internally to see if it was. In this case it was for marketing and wanted to make sure it was reasonable, and it did come down a bit, but the small supplier didn’t continue. To be clear they didn’t bring this up during the process, is was during their debrief as a “what can we do because this was a challenge for us.”
0129: One thing I see is we use the Merx platform, and it costs money and a lot of small businesses can’t afford that. Even in my previous role I’ve had people come to me and say “I can’t justify the cost of merx just to find work that might be right for me” so they don’t get notifications, so unless they’re being told they also aren’t aware of those contracts that might be right for them. They could get the documents for one particular procurement, but they might not get the chance to learn about them. Responding to RFPs can be as difficult as writing an RFP, so a small organization that doesn’t have in-house expertise on completing RFPs often can’t compete, or can’t afford the resources to apply. A platform that doesn’t cost people, or even a platform like Merx where organizations under X value in revenue maybe don’t have to pay might help that. Making it easier to write responses could help but I don’t know how to approach that. I think I write better RFPs because I’ve also written responses, but you can’t evaluate something full of errors and have confidence in a supplier diverse or otherwise when there are simple things that aren’t being covered.

Barriers 2A.2a
0105: I think the main barriers are around formatting and ease of use. We use a lot of traditional tools without baking accessibility into them. The way it’s organized, the types of forms being used, the way you navigate digital spaces. It needs improvement if you are using any kind of adaptive technology, and that’s part of what is being addressed now.

0106: We don’t know how to write our requirements. We’re notoriously not good at writing our requirements. That skill set is difficult. Because of who we are and how procurement has evolved in the last few years we weren’t part of trade agreements before. We would often have our vendors write requirements for us in the past.

0108: Always challenges, but getting it on paper and ensuring that it’s not biased is hard. Some are more challenging than others. The level of knowledge and expertise of some of our clients, how well they know what they want to procure. We work together to put the best out there to the market.

0110: When it comes to construction, a lot of the operating staff within those departments are not well trained enough in terms of developing the scope of work

0111: Subject matter expertise is something we always struggle with, if it’s something we buy frequently then we know how to buy it, but if it’s something like IT which is rapidly emerging, it becomes more difficult to define to scope of work, sometimes we do quality assurance and go back to them and ask to refine their needs, we provide resources to clients to seek consultants that can help more accurately define scopes of work

0114: Sometimes you just don’t have the time to build it out as detailed as you would like, maybe time and experience. I’m sure 5 years down the line I’ll write a much better RFP than today.

0115: Really defining and understanding and knowing what you’re looking for. You need enough detail to put together that scope of work. You need to understand what it is you’re actually procuring.

0119: Public procurement in Canada has a lot of rules with trade treaties. Writing non-biased (to one vendor) statements of work and deliverables, but it’s very difficult. In Canada it’s very hard to go out into the market space and do research, but there’s nervousness around what they did do. There’s a reservation for going out into the market space and doing pre-research which is a catch-22 because the suppliers who complain “you did research but you didn’t ask me” so they don’t go out and they write what they know, but then they have shortcomings. If you’re doing an RFP it takes 6 months, if you want to do an RFI to do research that’s another 3 months. It’s a different way to think about writing what you need in order to fit into the scoring matrix and be compliant with all of the trade treaties and bylaws. Our user guide for a client has 140 pages.

0122: Cost optimization and lack of resources. Most of my clients are in operations so asking them for a statement of work is taking them away from other projects or duties. Timeliness in response can be challenging. Like any organization that suffered through COVID, cost is a key factor as well so optimizing costs can be a barrier.

0125: I would have liked to have had more time to develop those requirements or to work with people to focus on some accommodations. For example, I didn’t have anyone on my team who uses a screen reader, so that’s something that may need to be adjusted. As a BA I’m pretty comfortable with this one. I’ve done other RFPs so that’s okay.

Barriers 2A.2b
0101: It needs to be clear. They need to understand what we’re asking. We need to limit ambiguity as much as possible. Being able to ask questions I think is very good in our organization (quick, thorough) to help reduce assumptions being made. If we make changes, do suppliers understand what they mean and why they’re important? Does the supplier know how to use the tool (SAP Ariba) and does the tool have accessibility in it to let that supplier use it to the best of their ability? Are we actually acting as a public company?

0102: Mental barrier for smaller companies, they don’t know what they’re doing

0104: Potentially, if we’re talking from the perspective of disability. It’s online so it’s very much computer-based / typing.

0106: We use MERX now, that’s relatively new. We used to post things on our website so suppliers wouldn’t necessarily know about our RFPs. A couple months ago we ran a simple RFQ process. The quote that was the best we couldn’t select because they filled out the forms wrong, and we were so stringent with policy we couldn’t select them.

0114: They’re pretty large, detailed documents. Pretty rigorous. So I would say time and if there are any accessibility difficulties in terms of reading or time spent at the computer, that would definitely make it hard for someone to respond to the bids that we put out.

0119: The tool that they need to submit it isn’t compliant to AODA. That being said if they reached out and said they needed an alternate format we’d provide it. One of the biggest barriers is they have to be registered in Ariba to get notices; they have to make sure they choose the right category. I actually tell them if they don’t know what category they are, choose all of them. You’ll get an email for every solicitation, but at least you can go through them. But if they’re in the wrong category they aren’t getting anything relevant to them. There are notices of intended procurement open to all suppliers, but if they aren’t signed up on the various platforms, they could very easily miss a notice. The number one barrier let’s say they get the notice, and they think “oh great I’m there,” and they open it up and it’s 60+ pages and think they need to hire a lawyer or that they can’t compete because the big companies have RFP writers. Generally speaking, evaluators like the small guy, and it doesn’t have to be fancy, and they don’t often like consulting companies who write these big responses, but they are very intimidated by the whole process, and they get worried that they’ll do something wrong that will have legal repercussions.

0120: If the supplier misses a small step there is no going back to remedy and the bid can be lost on a minor technicality.

Barriers 2A.2c
0101: Similar barriers, there’s work that can be done. We haven’t encountered in my group yet that someone is having difficulty using the tools. There are some abilities in the tools to do certain things (accessibility), but I think the barriers of the tool.

0106: No I don’t think so. Maybe the only barrier would be knowledge on how to do it. There is a significant number of people in the organization that buy a lot of stuff so they know whatever it is and exactly how to buy that stuff. Everyone else doesn’t buy that often, and that’s not enough time to remember how to do it, who you have to talk to, what forms you need to fill out, the processes & thresholds, why you have to follow them. That’s a barrier for them, they just don’t know about it, a lot of people don’t buy things very often.

0113: There’s a certain amount of trust that pre-approved vendors are representative. We get proposals from disabled-owned businesses, but I wonder how those suppliers came to the table, and who did we exclude in the process? We’ve received bids from large suppliers with name recognition who use ableist language in their proposals, but they’re so large that they can overcome hurdles in procurement.

0114: Sometimes it’s just very slow to hear back from people. I think the organization has good work life balance, but sometimes it takes me a couple weeks to write the statement of requirements and then it might be another month to hear back from sourcing and another month to hear back from suppliers and before you know it it’s been half a year.


0119: There’s a lot of steps (see above).

0124: Definitely when we think about business owned by disabled or Veterans, it’s the same issue that employees or applicants have and it’s the fear to self-disclose. It’s difficult to break down that stigma and get past that. I think organizations are used to working with big firms, big corporations to get these reports or services, and they’re not tailored at all to the needs of the organization and then the program leads have to take these reports and try to become experts in the thing they hired these firms to do so that they wouldn’t have to do the strategic thinking and mapping and planning. It takes another 6 months to a year to dissect that advisory guidance to shift it to practical application.

0125: Ordering was okay, I think what hit us a couple times was the template changed during development, and because of organizational changes routing who was paying caused some issues.

0129: I think part of it is around having to choose who approves things as opposed to a system that automatically knows where a requisition should be going. Sometimes the complexities of the system, you need an intense amount of training. I always have to do expenses twice. It’s hard and it’s easy to make mistakes. If a business unit puts it in and doesn’t do it right we don’t reach out to them to talk about how to do it right or else everything needs to be re-approved, we just send it back to them. But that can be embarrassing for the clerk who made the mistake who now needs to go back to their team and their boss and say they did it wrong and they have to figure out how to do it right, redo the whole approval process, put it back in. I think the process creates anxiety, it isn’t fair to people. For people who make an error it’ll make them more anxious each time it gets rejected, and as they get more anxious they’re more likely to make more errors, and that’s how you convince people to quit when there’s no compassion or assistance, or they take longer because they’re checking and rechecking so many times before submitting. It’s viewed as a training thing but not everyone can do something this difficult or complex correct every time. Other than dollar value anything else can be solved. In my unit I’m telling people to put it in wrong and we’ll fix it as we go through because we can do that, but there isn’t that attitude here. There’s a perspective that it’s how we do it. Procurement is known as the department of “no” and rejection and “this is how you did it wrong” and it should be the department of “yes,” how can I help you get what you need? It’s procedure to kick those things back if they’re incorrect. I’d probably get in trouble if someone found out that I don’t kick things back.