The Texas legislature has passed a bill allowing municipalities to accept bids via the Internet.  Electronic bidding has been very efficient in reducing errors and time involved in submitting a bid and reviewing it and provides Lubbock Power & Light with the potential to obtain better overall value for the taxpayer through increased efficiencies and reduced pricing. While no system is perfect, we have found that the use of electronic bid receipt encourages increased bidder responses.  Many of our suppliers have found that it is simply more convenient to prepare a bid response on-line as opposed to completing, printing and mailing a copy of the bid. 

The Lubbock Power & Light Purchasing Department provides bid notification and receives selected bids electronically over the Internet utilizing a comprehensive e-procurement platform.

The e-procurement platform will distribute automatic email notifications to member vendors. Vendors will receive notification for goods and/or services as selected by the vendor during sign up.  The e-procurement platform will allow vendors to submit bids electronically in a secure environment. While there is no cost for vendors to sign up for the e-procurement platform, the system is paid for by a 1% transaction fee (on our electronic bids only) to e-procurement platform which is only paid by the "successful" vendor for bids accepted electronically and awarded electronically on their system.  The e-procurement platform will provide free notification of PAPER ONLY bids and proposals for selected goods and services.  PAPER ONLY bids are marked by this symbol “”, and the 1% fee does not apply to these bids.  This service is free to you, even if you never respond to our electronic bids.

Vendors who wish to receive all bids, quotations and proposals without having to contact the Purchasing Department each time should contact the e-procurement platform vendor (no registration fee) to be placed on the bidders list.

Note: One form of electronic bidding that you may see on the e-procurement platform is the “reverse auction”.  Many agencies across the State of Texas have been using reverse auctions with great success for some time now.  The benefits of reverse auctions are not exclusive to the buyer in a dynamic pricing event.  Suppliers can also benefit because they spend less time preparing extensive paper documents for a static one-chance bid. Suppliers that participate in reverse auctions benefit by seeing their competitors' bids (without knowing the identity of the bidder) and having the opportunity to submit counter offers to better compete in a transparent market environment, significantly improving their chances to secure the business.