Procurement nightmares
Procurement in local government certainly is an absolute PITA.
You need to jump through so many hoops to ensure that you don't get sued for choosing one bid over another, never mind picking the best product or getting the best price.You can't easily haggle, you can't ask questions of one supplier and not the other, everything must be recorded and justified. It adds a huge price to any major procurement and many low value ones as well.
Then the suppliers are often colossal arses as well. The procurement might be for a £5M system but the sales droid filling in the paperwork usually can't be arsed and misses critical bits out, doesn't understand the questions or doesn't read the questions. So you can have a system that you really want to buy that is good value but you've had to score lowly becasue the salesman was hungover and the rules mean you can't go back and get them to correct it.
Or the sales people really can' be arsed (sounds like this one) and rather than answer the questions they just supply reams of pdfs, often hundreds of pages long, and just say the answer is in the attached. Somewhere. Probably.