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Solution · ProcurementA procurement procedure built from approved clauses, with its file complete when it closes
Public procedures assembled from an approved clause library
The specification is assembled from clauses the legal team approved, bidder questions run through one register, and the procedure file is written as the procedure happens.
Executive summary
Every new procedure starts as a copy of the last one, mistakes included.
The change starts before the first document exists.
One question produces one answer in one wording, published once, with the approver's name against it.
the procedure workspace and file on SharePoint; the question register; the electronic records system
Business problem
Public procurement
A procurement procedure is a document set with legal consequences, and an authority produces it over and over. The fastest route to a first draft is the last procedure that went through without a challenge, so what travels forward is not only the structure: a definition corrected once, an annex pointing at a withdrawn form, a payment term the treasurer stopped accepting. A copy does not know which of its parts were deliberate.
The document is written by four people who never sit in the same room: the requesting unit supplies the subject and the technical description, the substantive department the evaluation criteria, legal the contract terms, finance the estimated value and the budget commitment. Fragments arrive over about ten days, and one specialist merges them and carries the result.
Then the questions start, reaching the procurement mailbox, the personal mailbox of whoever signed the notice, sometimes the requesting unit directly. Each has an answer deadline, and every answer belongs to all bidders in identical words, because equal treatment is the point of the procedure. The file comes last: what was published and when, which version each bidder could download, who approved each answer. None of it was recorded as it happened, so it is reconstructed from mailboxes and the drive.
How it works today
This is the shape of the process in most offices, whatever records system sits underneath.
- PersonThe requesting unit emails the subject, the technical description and the estimated value to procurement
- WaitingThe request waits until a specialist is free, then the nearest previous procedure is copied into a new folder
- PersonThe specialist edits the specification and chases legal for contract terms and finance for the budget commitment
- Risk of errorAnnexes come from whichever folder was open, and a superseded clause travels into the new procedure unnoticed
- PersonThe set is published and the dates that now run go into somebody's calendar
- WaitingQuestions arrive in three mailboxes and by phone, then wait for the substantive department to find time
- Risk of errorTwo answers to one question go out in different wordings, and the answer deadline is counted by hand
- PersonAfter the opening, the file is rebuilt from mailboxes, the drive and the platform
Why the current process costs more than it appears
The budget shows headcount, not what it is spent on.
- Copying carries defects forward at no visible cost. A clause that survived three procedures looks approved, and nobody re-reads it until a bidder builds an argument on it.
- Four contributors and one deadline produce a queue only the specialist can see, and days lost waiting for contract terms or a budget confirmation are recorded nowhere.
- Answering the same question twice is not an administrative slip: two wordings in circulation is a difference in what bidders were told, easy to find and hard to explain.
- Capacity, not policy, sets how the office buys. When the unit is full a subordinate unit's request waits, and the annual plan quietly becomes a forecast rather than a commitment.
Cost of inaction
A copied clause is only wrong once it matters. The wording that survived three procedures is the one a bidder builds an argument on in the fourth, and by then the office is defending a document nobody wrote on purpose.
The second exposure is evidentiary and it grows quietly. A file assembled after the opening is a reconstruction made by the people who ran the procedure, from whatever they still have. The version a bidder actually downloaded, the hour an answer went out and the name of the person who approved it are the three things nobody records at the time and everybody needs a year later.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A city office of about 650 employees, buying for itself and for roughly twenty subordinate units; a four-person procurement unit; Microsoft 365 with Teams and SharePoint, an electronic records system and a separate financial-accounting system.
210 procedures a year: around 130 supplies and services, 50 works and 30 social and other special services; most below the EU thresholds, about a dozen above; six to ten bidder questions on a larger procedure.
Each procedure starts from the folder of a previous one. Fragments arrive from four contributors over about ten days, are merged by one specialist, published, then answered from three mailboxes. The file is assembled after the opening.
About six and a half hours per procedure of assembly and question handling, spread across the specialist, the lawyer and the requesting unit's contributor, plus waiting time nobody counts.
A request to start a procedure is a structured intake in Teams; robots assemble the specification and its annexes from the clause set legal approved for that procedure type and value band; every question enters one register with its deadline, approved answer and publication date; every step writes itself into the file.
In the modelled case, assembly and question handling fall from about six and a half hours to roughly ninety minutes of review per procedure, and the file is complete on the day the procedure closes. Every figure here is a model built on stated assumptions.
Proposed solution
The change starts before the first document exists. A request to open a procedure becomes a form in Microsoft Teams: requesting unit, subject, procedure type, estimated value and its basis, budget line, planned dates and criteria. The form creates the case, the workspace and the first entry in the procedure file, and will not submit without a value or a budget line.
Assembly then follows a library the legal team owns. Each clause sits on SharePoint as a versioned item with an effective date, an owner, and the procedure types and value bands it belongs to. A robot picks the set that applies, fills the variable fields from the intake, reads the estimated value and the budget commitment from the financial system, and writes the specification and its annexes into the workspace as one set. It chooses and fills; it does not draft, and no wording reaches a bidder that a lawyer has not approved.
Questions and deadlines run through one register: whatever channel a question arrives on, it is logged with the time received, the deadline the rules produce, the drafting department, the approver and the publication date. The decision stays with people. Officials evaluate, sign and answer for the procedure, the lawyer owns the clauses, and the automation moves documents, checks completeness and computes dates.
UiPath Orchestrator queues, triggers and audit; UiPath Action Center tasks completed as actionable notifications in Microsoft Teams; UiPath Integration Service connectors for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint; SharePoint versioning and permissions; a SharePoint list as the question register; Power BI reporting
The intake form and its validation, the clause library structure, the mapping from procedure type and value band to a clause set, the assembly robots, the deadline rules, the question register with its approval routing, and the write-back that keeps the file current
The authority's financial-accounting system for the estimated value and the budget commitment, through its API or a read-only view; the electronic records system for the case reference
How the automated process works
- PersonThe requesting unit submits the start-a-procedure form in Teams: subject, estimated value and its basis, budget line, dates and criteria
- AutomationA robot opens the case, creates the workspace, writes the first entry in the file and checks the request against the annual plan
- SystemThe estimated value and the budget commitment are read from the financial system; the procedure type and value band follow the authority's rules
- AutomationThe specification and every mandatory annex are assembled from the current approved clause set, variable fields filled from the intake
- PersonThe specialist and the lawyer review the set in Action Center, and the approval goes to the head of the authority in Teams
- AutomationAfter publication the reference, the publication date and every deadline that now runs are written into the file
- AutomationEvery question is logged in the register with its answer deadline; the draft goes to the department and then to the approver in Teams
- AutomationPublished answers and changes to the specification are recorded as new versions, so the file is complete when the procedure closes
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Assembling the document set from approved clauses and filling the variable fields from the intake and the financial system
- Reading the estimated value and the budget commitment, and checking the request against the annual plan
- Computing and tracking every deadline, and escalating the ones that are close
- Logging each step, version and approval into the procedure file as it happens
People decide
- The head of the authority approves and signs; nothing is published without that approval
- Legal owns the clause library; a robot never writes, edits or invents a clause
- The substantive department writes the answer to a bidder's question, and a named person approves it before publication
- Evaluation, exclusion and every decision on an offer stay with the officials who answer for them
Before and after
Systems and integrations
Every entry can be checked in vendor documentation. The evidence class is stated next to each one.
Inputs
- the start-a-procedure form in Microsoft Teams
- the approved clause library on SharePoint
- the annual procurement plan
- the financial-accounting system
- bidder questions from the mailbox, the platform and the departments
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
Target systems
- the procedure workspace and file on SharePoint
- the question register
- the electronic records system
- Power BI
Human touchpoints: review and approval tasks in Microsoft Teams; drafting and approving answers in the register; publication by an authorised official
Technologies used
assemble the document set, run the deadline rules and hold the audit record
Areview and approval tasks completed inside Microsoft Teams, with the document attached
Aintake events, workspace files and register updates without custom code
Athe intake form, review prompts, approval steps and the question register
Athe versioned clause library, the procedure workspace and the file
Athe annual plan against reality: procedures in progress, deadlines running, time to publication
Athe estimated value, the budget commitment and the case reference
CIllustrative economic model
The arithmetic is open, so it can be argued with.
Assembly and question handling are the only work priced here; evaluation, the committee's time and everything after the opening stay outside the model. The 390 minutes per procedure and the 210 procedures a year are this illustrative office's assumptions, not a measurement at any authority, and €24 an hour is a fully loaded cost of an administrative post in Central Europe. The arithmetic shows released capacity, never a post removed.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- One question produces one answer in one wording, published once, with the approver's name against it
- The file is complete when the procedure closes, so an audit question is answered by opening a workspace
- A clause corrected once is corrected everywhere, and the next procedure of that type takes the new version
- Deadlines are computed and watched rather than carried in a calendar, and the close ones escalate in time to be met
- Subordinate units get a route in that produces a usable request, removing most of the correspondence before a procedure
The management view
- The annual procurement plan becomes a status rather than a document: what has started, what waits for whom, what is late
- Responsibility is legible at every step, because each approval carries a name, a time and the version approved
- Procedures survive absence and turnover: the clause set, the rules and the file belong to the office
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
Security is designed with the process, not after it.
- Robots work under their own named accounts with the narrowest rights the task needs: read-only on the financial system, write access confined to the procedure workspace
- Only the legal team publishes a clause version; the robot reads the library and never writes to it, and a superseded version stays in the history, so the wording in force on a given day can be shown
- Documents, the register and the file stay in the authority's Microsoft 365 tenant, the robots run from the EU region of UiPath Automation Cloud, and credentials come from the Orchestrator credential store rather than a workflow
- Drafting and approving an answer are separate roles held by separate people, both recorded with a name and a time
- Bidder questions carry names and contact details; the register inherits the office's retention rules and access is limited to the unit and the department that answers
Why now
The EU thresholds for 2026 and 2027 went down rather than up: €140,000 for supplies and services at central authorities, €216,000 at sub-central ones and €5,404,000 for works, announced by the President of Poland's Public Procurement Office in December 2025. A clause set still carrying the earlier figures prepares procedures on the wrong basis.
The modelled 1,365 hours a year of assembling documents and handling questions is about €32,760 of administrative capacity, almost none of it the part of procurement that requires an official's judgement.
Assembling a document set from a versioned library, routing an approval into Teams and writing an audit entry at every step are configuration rather than development: Action Center tasks are completed inside Teams as actionable notifications, and Integration Service carries the Teams and SharePoint events both ways.
Relevant executive roles
Answers for how the office runs; procedures stop depending on which specialist is available
Receives a queue with computed deadlines instead of a folder of half-finished drafts
Owns the clause library and knows which wording is live and in which procedures
Estimated value and budget commitment are checked before a procedure starts, not after the offers are opened
Common questions and objections
Some are, and those keep their bespoke parts. What repeats is the frame: formal requirements, annexes, contract terms, communication rules. In most offices that frame is the majority of the pages and almost none of the thinking.
It does not write them. Every clause was drafted and approved by your legal team and carries a version and an effective date; the robot selects the approved set and fills the fields the intake supplied. Nothing reaches a bidder without a person approving it.
Then the library has a starting point. A template is a file somebody copies; a clause set has an owner, a version and a record of which procedures used it, which turns a correction into a correction everywhere.
When this is not the right solution
- An office running a handful of procedures a year, where a checklist and one experienced specialist are cheaper than anything built
- Legal has not consolidated the wording and there is no agreement on which clauses are approved; that consolidation comes first and it is not automation
- Large works procedures with an individual technical programme each time, where the annexes, the register and the file repay the effort but the specification body does not
A question for the next management meeting
A bidder's question arrives this afternoon: who drafts the answer, by what date must it be published, and where will that be recorded a year from now when an auditor asks?
Implementation approach
Delivery runs in stages, so it can be stopped at any point.
We deliver
- A read of a sample of your recent procedures: which documents repeat, which clauses genuinely differ and where questions come from
- The clause library on SharePoint: clause, version, effective date, owner and the procedure types and value bands it applies to, with legal as the only editor
- The intake form in Teams and the rules mapping a request to a procedure type, a value band and a clause set
- The assembly robots, the mandatory annex checks and the write-back that keeps the procedure file current
- The question register with deadline computation and approval routing, the integrations to the financial and records systems, and Power BI reporting
We need from you
- Twelve to twenty complete procedures from the last two years, with their published documents and questions
- A named owner in the procurement unit and a named lawyer to own the clause library
- Read access to the procurement plan, the financial system and the records system, with technical accounts of their own
- Your internal rules: who approves what, at which value and in which order
Stages
Discovery
Two years of procedures, the documents that repeat and the clauses that genuinely differ
Clause library
Legal consolidates the approved wording; we build the versioning, ownership and mapping around it
Build
Intake, assembly, question register, deadline rules, file write-back and the Teams touchpoints
Validation
Robots re-assemble procedures the office already ran, compared clause by clause with what was published
Go-live
One procedure type first, with the full review gate and hypercare
Optimisation
Clause tuning, question categories and reporting as the library settles
Departmental. Effort is driven by how far your specifications actually differ, how many procedure types and value bands your rules define, and whether the financial and records systems expose an interface a robot can use.
A wrong clause does not stay in one procedure; it travels into the next four.
Send us the published document sets from five procedures you ran last year, of different types. You get back the clause overlap we found, the fragments that genuinely varied, and an honest first estimate of the assembly effort.
Measure the overlap in five proceduresThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
Your bid team spends its best days reading tender packs, not deciding which ones to win.
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View solution Legal & complianceStandard contracts generated, approved and e‑signed in a dayA two-page NDA takes ten days because it is copied, proofread, printed, scanned and filed by hand.
View solutionIndustries we deliver this in most oftenPublic sector