All MIND over matter in future ONGC tenders
ONGC is on a mission to increase competition in tenders for a range of services, from drilling rigs to offshore supply vessels.
Two departments are focusing on this: the Nodal Technical Agency (NTA) and the Materials Management Intelligence & Design Group (MIND). They sound like the names of top secret agencies out of a Hollywood blockbuster, but they have a more mundane yet important assignment: analysing how to tweak tender specifications to strike a balance, allowing only the best companies into the race.
Neither do they want to favour only a few companies and invite possible corruption allegations, nor do they want to open the field to everyone, including less competent companies. On April 17 (2024), MIND presented what ONGC calls its "criticality matrix" in a central procurement council meeting to help analyse tenders to achieve the desired results.
"MIND presented an analysis of the last five years of all tenders and highlighted categories where a lone bidder participated and identified priority areas that need more competition," says a source. He adds that management might assign more staff to MIND to study tenders where less than three bidders took part.
MIND was formed through a decision by a special executive committee meeting on April 29 (2023). On October 1 (2023), it became fully operational for seven categories of ONGC services: onshore workover rigs, onshore drilling rigs, offshore jack-ups, helicopters, anchor handling tug boats, offshore supply vessels or platform supply vessels, tankers and Multi-Support Vessels (MSVs).
In 2022-23 alone, ONGC spent as much as Rs16,500cr (nearly $2bn) in these areas. Rohit Madan, in charge of MIND, sent out an order on October 7 (2023) stressing that "all work centres should obtain MIND's inputs on bid evaluation criteria and cost estimates before floating any tender of more than Rs10cr ($1.2m) in the above-mentioned categories."
Madan marked the order to all asset managers, basin managers, service shiefs and plant heads.