Public construction contracts above a certain contract value are secured with a guarantee. Until now, these guarantee certificates have been provided by banks and insurance companies in paper form. From now on, the City of Bonn will also accept these surety certificates digitally - and thus work completely electronically when awarding contracts.

Two leading guarantors have developed a web-based platform called "Trustlog", which can now be used to receive and manage guarantees digitally. In a lean end-to-end process, "Trustlog" maps guarantees completely digitally over their entire life cycle.

As part of a pilot project, the Public Procurement Services department of the City of Bonn was the first German municipality to create the conditions for accepting guarantee documents digitally with immediate effect. Among other things, it was necessary to digitally reproduce the processes required by budgetary law together with the treasury and tax office, taking into account auditing.

One advantage here is that guarantees from the construction sector have always been managed centrally in the Procurement Services department.

This means that the last part of the municipal procurement process has also been digitized. The City of Bonn's Procurement Services department can now offer all services relating to the awarding of contracts digitally and is thus taking on a pioneering role. The pandemic in particular has shown how valuable the electronic procurement workflow is for the more than 760 procurers and the large number of external project participants.