The timeline is set by the destination, not the item
Most procurement plans are built around the item: what it is, what it costs, how long the supplier needs. In Afghanistan the destination usually dominates. The same consignment of hygiene kits can be a two-week exercise into Kabul and a six-week exercise into a district of Daykundi or Nuristan, because the constraint is not manufacturing capacity but road access, load consolidation and the availability of a driver who has run that route before.
This has a practical consequence for planning. A procurement schedule that quotes a single lead time for a multi-province distribution is describing an average that applies to none of the locations. It is more useful to plan by corridor — group destinations that share a route and a seasonal window, and give each group its own delivery date — than to promise one date and renegotiate it later.
Seasonal access is the part most often underestimated. High-altitude routes into the central highlands and parts of the north-east close or become unreliable in winter, and a distribution scheduled for January into those areas is effectively a different operation from the same distribution in June. Where a programme has discretion over timing, moving a delivery window by three weeks is often cheaper than paying for the transport arrangement that a closed pass requires; the winter pre-positioning guide sets out how to plan for it.
Lead time is a chain, not a number
A supplier's "two weeks" is usually one link in a longer chain, and the delivery date is set by the slowest link. Before promising a date to a programme, list the steps between today and acceptance at the destination, and ask whoever owns each step how long it takes for this requirement:
Specification sign-off
The programme and, where required, the donor approve the specification before suppliers are asked to quote.
Market availability
Whether the item is stocked in the region, held in Kabul or imported to order; each has a different lead time and risk.
Supplier checks
Due diligence on the shortlist, which can remove a preferred bidder if it is left late.
Quotation period and evaluation
The time suppliers are given to quote, and the time your committee needs to compare and recommend.
Approval and contract
Approval at the authority level the value requires, the contract or purchase order, and any advance or pre-financing arrangement.
Samples, production and kitting
Sample approval before bulk purchase, and the time to assemble and pack kits where one component sets the pace for the whole kit.
Inspection
When an inspector can be at the supplier's or the warehouse, and the time to replace anything rejected.
Transport and access
The corridor and the season for each destination, and any transfer to smaller vehicles for the last part of the route.
Receipt and records
Acceptance at the destination and the records that close the purchase.
None of these has a standard duration. Ask each supplier to state its own steps and their length in its quotation, ask your approvers for theirs, and plan the date from the longest chain rather than the quickest quote.
Write the specification for the market that exists
A specification copied from a global catalogue will often describe an item nobody in the country stocks. What follows is predictable: no compliant quotations, a waiver request, a delay, and eventually a substitution agreed under time pressure with less scrutiny than the original decision would have received.
Market research before the specification is finalised avoids most of this. The question to answer is not only whether an item is available, but at what point in the chain it becomes available — imported to order, held in Kabul, or genuinely stocked in the region where it is needed. Those three answers imply three different lead times and three different risk profiles.
Where a specification must stay fixed for programme reasons, say so explicitly and price the consequence. Where it can flex, define the flex in advance: state the performance the item must meet rather than the brand, and name the tolerances that are acceptable. A supplier can quote against that. A supplier cannot quote against a specification that will be reinterpreted after the bids arrive. For kits, where one scarce component sets the lead time for the whole kit, the NFI and hygiene-kit guide goes further. For food packages, the food package checklist turns the specification into a commodity matrix and an inspection record.
Supplier checks are a scheduling item, not a formality
Due diligence — licensing, capacity, references, conflict-of-interest screening — is treated in many plans as an administrative step that happens somewhere between award and delivery. In practice it is the step most likely to remove a preferred bidder, and finding that out late means restarting the comparison with the clock already running.
Running the checks against a shortlist before quotations are formally compared costs a few days and removes the worst outcome, which is a compliant-looking file built on a supplier who cannot pass review. It also surfaces the capacity question that price alone conceals: a supplier who can genuinely deliver 500 kits can quote convincingly for 5,000 and discover the difference only after award.
Licensing and registration
Current, verifiable and matching the entity that will actually invoice — not an affiliate with a similar name.
Demonstrated capacity
Evidence of comparable volume delivered, rather than a stated ability to supply any quantity requested.
Regional reach
Whether the supplier can deliver to the destination or only to a consolidation point, and what the gap costs.
Conflict of interest
Relationships between bidders, and between bidders and programme staff, checked before the comparison is made.
References that can be called
Contactable clients for comparable work, not a list of logos.
The supplier due diligence checklist turns these checks into a form that records what was seen, by whom and when.
Compare quotations like with like
A comparison is only as good as the basis it compares on. Every quotation should price the same specification, the same quantity, the same packing and the same delivered destination, and state its lead time and whether the stock is actually held. A lower price for goods collected in Kabul is not comparable with a price delivered to a district, and a quotation silent on availability is an intention rather than an offer.
Write the evaluation down as it is made: the quotations received, how each was scored, the recommendation, and approval at the authority level the contract requires. That record is what lets a reviewer understand the choice months later, and it is the first document a donor audit of the purchase will ask for.
The sheet below puts that comparison on one page: every line priced against the same specification and destination, the terms that change the real cost, and the recommendation with its approvals. Print it, or take it into Word and add your organisation's thresholds.
Quotation comparison sheet
Completed by the evaluation team after quotations are opened, and kept in the procurement file.
The purchase
Requisition and RFQ reference
What is being bought
Delivered toThe destinations every quotation must price
Currency compared in
Quotations requested and receivedNumber of each
Opened on, byDate, and the two people present
Line by line
| Line | Item and specification | Unit | Quantity | A: unit price | A: meets spec? | B: unit price | B: meets spec? | C: unit price | C: meets spec? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
What changes the real cost
| Supplier A | Supplier B | Supplier C | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total, delivered to the destinations named | |||
| Taxes included, and on their own line? | |||
| Lead time stated, step by step | |||
| Stock held, or bought to order? | |||
| Quotation valid until | |||
| Excluded from the price | |||
| Payment terms or advance requested | |||
| Samples approved? | |||
| Supplier checks passed? |
Recommendation
Recommended supplier
WhyIf not the lowest compliant offer, say why
| Name | Signature | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prepared by | |||
| Reviewed by | |||
| Approved by, at the authority level required |
Inspect before you accept
Quality assurance happens twice. Before bulk purchase, samples are checked against the specification so that a mismatch is found while it is still cheap to fix. On delivery, goods are inspected for specification, quantity, expiry date and condition, with photographs, and only then accepted; a shortfall or defect is recorded on the inspection report and raised with the supplier before the goods move on.
An inspection without a signed record is not evidence. The report should name the inspector, the date, what was checked and the result, and it should sit in the same file as the approval and the goods received note so the chain from purchase to acceptance can be followed without asking anyone.
Decide the evidence plan before the goods move
The documentation a donor-funded purchase needs is knowable at the start: quotation comparison, approval, inspection record, goods received note, waybill, delivery note, recipient evidence, invoice, reconciliation. What varies is whether it is captured while the work happens or assembled afterwards from memory and photographs.
Assembled files are where audit findings come from. A delivery note signed on the day, with the right quantities and a legible name, is a two-minute task in the field and an unrecoverable gap six months later. Agreeing the evidence set — including who signs what, and in which language — before mobilisation is what makes the difference, and it belongs in the contract rather than in an email.
It is worth being specific about beneficiary-facing evidence in particular. Distribution records, identity verification and acknowledgement formats should be agreed with the programme team, since these are the documents most likely to be reviewed and the ones hardest to reconstruct. The distribution service describes how these records are produced in the field.
Frameworks remove the step that costs the most time
For programmes that buy repeatedly, the longest recurring cost is not delivery but the procurement cycle itself. A framework or retainer establishes rates, terms and controls once; individual requirements are then issued as task orders and mobilised without a fresh tender each time.
This is how most of Zhikal's institutional work runs, including a nationwide non-food-item retainer covering market research, pre-financed procurement, quality assurance, warehousing, transport and accountability records across 28 listed item categories. The operational gain is not a lower unit price — it is that a requirement raised on Monday does not wait three weeks for a procurement process that has already been run. Procurement and sourcing sets out the cycle, the page for UN agencies and NGOs covers task-order delivery and prequalification, and the guide to framework agreements and one-off procurement sets out what a framework should fix and what each task order confirms.