National Best Quality Software Gold Award for Affno

One of Sri Lanka's leading software engineering companies, Affno (www.affno.lk), for web based software products, won a Gold Award for their eTender product at the National Best Quality Software Awards 2005.

Of the eight categories, Affno's product competed in the category with the highest number of contenders. The winners were announced at the National Best Quality Software Awards event held in Colombo recently. Affno was also selected to participate in the Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA) to be held in Australia later this year.

Chairman of ICTA Prof. V. K. Samaranayake presented the trophy to Suren Kannangara, Affno's CEO. The National Best Quality Software Awards recognises and honours significant technological developments and innovation in Sri Lanka's software industry. Five-year old Affno is renowned for their innovative suite of software products focused on knowledge management. They were the winner of the Gold Award for eGovernment last year, and won this year's Gold Award for their eTender product. Senior officials of Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT), Affno's first customer for this product also graced the occasion.

Among the criteria for judging was the market potential for the product. Experts believe that the Affno eTender system will become a standard requirement in almost every public sector organisation in Sri Lanka very soon.

Affno's eTender product has completely revolutionised the tender procedure at SLT. Now SLT has the choice of calling for 'sealed' tenders or opening up a tender for on-line bidding similar to an on-line auction. Within just a few months of going live with Affno's eTender product, SLT has already successfully published some 40 tenders through the system of which 10 were for on-line bidding. Being completely web based, the system enables tenders published to reach a worldwide audience.

SLT has made a policy decision to conduct 100% of their tenders exclusively through the eTender system. This will make the tender process more transparent. It would also make it more effective as suppliers from anywhere in the world can participate in tenders giving SLT a much better choice.

Efficiency of the tender process is also greatly enhanced as it will eliminate time-consuming linear processes and replace them with paperless and concurrent processes. SLT estimates that the tender publishing cycle, which took days, previously has now been reduced to a few hours.

Added to all this, the Affno eTender system brings enormous cost effectiveness as well. SLT estimates that the cost savings are so much that its investment on the system would be recouped within a few months.