Electronic procurement portal with sealed bidding

The challenge

Public procurement lives or dies on one guarantee: no bid amount can be seen, by anyone, before the opening. Paper achieves that with a sealed envelope and a locked box. Most electronic systems ask the buyer to trust that staff will not look. An organisation running its own procurement also needs the rest of the process - notices, procurement plan, bidder registry, standard documents, results, contracts and blacklist - to be public, timestamped and defensible to an auditor.

What we did

We built the portal around the sealed bid. When a bidder submits, the priced schedule is encrypted into a sealed snapshot with an integrity hash, and no staff screen can render a bid amount until both the submission deadline and the scheduled opening time have passed and an opening committee records the opening. At opening every snapshot is re-hashed and compared with the live record, and any mismatch is reported to the committee instead of being accepted. Every submission is timestamped by the server clock in Kathmandu time.

Around that core sits the full lifecycle: notice publication, bidder registration and eligibility checks, bid opening, ranking, letter of intent, standstill period, award and contract, each with its own role. The public side shows current notices, the annual procurement plan, award results, a contract register, blacklisted firms, standard bidding documents and news. The interface is in Nepali and English, every date is shown in both AD and Bikram Sambat, deadlines are confirmed by SMS, and the portal installs to a phone's home screen and warns when the connection drops so a bidder is never misled about whether a submission went through.

The outcome

A procuring organisation gets a portal it can defend: the sealing guarantee is enforced by the software and covered by automated tests, not by policy. The demonstration portal is live for anyone to explore, and the system deploys on ordinary shared hosting with no build step.