Impetus of QBS
Qualifications-Based Selection was developed because public owners lacked procurement tools for services for which price competition made no sense. For example, creative services cannot be fairly priced before the creative process has taken place. An architect can hardly "hard bid" (submit a firm price for) a project when part of the cost to the architectural firm (and therefore its needs for compensation) will be determined later in the process of discovery of the owner's needs and intentions. Further, lowest cost is widely recognized as the poorest criterion for service selection when quality and professional creativity are sought. An apt analogy from outside of the construction arena often cited is in the area of medical care: Nobody willingly chooses a surgeon based upon a doctor's willingness to perform an operation most cheaply. Whereas private owners can use common sense to procure services based upon an evaluation of sources of greatest delivery of value, public owners, under political scrutiny, have been bound to the presumed objectivity of selections based on lowest price, even if a realistic price could not be determined. Such situations have led toTypical QBS process
Under QBS, the owner would publicly advertise a project and describe it in significant detail in a published "Request for Qualifications" (RFQ). The RFQ should contain selection criteria explicitly in order for firms to judge the likelihood of being selected. The owner would invite firms to submit their qualifications for evaluation by the selection committee, which must then rank-order the firms using the published selection criteria in making their evaluations. Commonly, the initial evaluation of qualifications submittals will lead to a shortlist of three to five firms that the selection committee judges to be well qualified to perform the work. Through an additional " Request for Proposals" (RFP), these shortlisted firms may be invited to submit more detailed ideas about the specific project at hand. The selection committee would also evaluate responses to the RFP, and often invite firms to interview in person. Ultimately, the selection committee will provide the owner with a final rank ordering of the shortlisted firms. The owner would then invite the top-ranked firm to enter into negotiations to establish compensation and other contractual terms. If negotiations are not successful and the parties cannot agree to a contract, the owner would dismiss the top-ranked firm and invite the second-ranked firm to negotiate, and so on until a contract is concluded.Electronic Submittal Process
Until recently the evaluations of qualifications submittals was a completely manual process. This meant that each firm submitting on specific projects would typically need to include multiple copies of the requested items for each selection committee member as well as a copy that would remain on file with the agency. With the release of GSA's Standard Form (SF) 330 in 2004, agencies now have the capability to request that a submittal be performed in an entirely paperless environment with the use of an Electronic Submittal Process (ESP). Beyond a simple document management system, a true ESP will extract essential information from submitted items, maintain lists of projects and specific evaluation criteria, and provide tools for committees to objectively compare, score and rank firms in an efficient manner.References
{{Reflist Federal government of the United States Procurement