BENGALURU: The country's largest IT services company Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will transform the government's e-Marketplace (GeM) into a public procurement platform.
TCS announced its partnership with the government on Tuesday, and said it will design and build a new modern solution leveraging new technologies, while maintaining the current platform.
The GeM platform provides an end-to-end online marketplace for central and state government bodies, including public sector undertakings, for procurement of common use goods and services. This e-marketplace currently handles a Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of over Rs 2 lakh crore purchased by over 70,000 buyer organisations from over 6.5 million sellers and service providers, including over 800,000 medium and small enterprises.
The current platform has architectural challenges in scaling up and in meeting the evolving needs of buyers and sellers.
TCS said the new GeM platform will be based on e-commerce and e-marketplace principles with multi-tenancy, multi-rule, multilingual, open source, and open-API-based architecture. It will be highly scalable, designed to accommodate the anticipated six-fold growth in GMV over the next six years, the company added.
The new platform will use data analytics to forecast projections and improve supply chain management, and advanced AI/ML technologies to help identify potential fraud.
PK Singh, CEO, GeM, said, "In its next avatar, GeM is envisioned to be an all-inclusive platform for government procurement, offering improved ease of doing business and transparency."
TCS' Public Services India business unit provides services to central and state governments, and these include passport issuance, health insurance, financial inclusion, investor facilitation, and pensions administration.