What is a DCE?

A DCE works as the reference file for a French public tender: suppliers download it, read its rules and build their response around it. The term belongs to French public procurement, where a DCE spans several files, each with its own French name and acronym. The files change with the contract, but the core ones carry the same names from one buyer to the next.

What a DCE contains

In a French marché public, or public contract, the DCE is the set of files a public buyer publishes to explain what it wants to buy and how it will choose a supplier. A typical dossier de consultation des entreprises holds the consultation rules, a commitment form, the contract's administrative and technical terms and one or more price schedules, often with plans, drawings and other annexes. Entreprendre Service Public, the French government's portal for businesses, advises reading each document rather than reusing a standard response file.

Règlement de la consultation (RC)

The règlement de la consultation, or consultation rules, is the instruction sheet for responding. It lists the forms the supplier must complete for its application, the size and format of the files, any site visit, what the offer must contain, the deadline and how long the offer must stay valid. It also sets the award criteria, the factors the buyer scores offers against, with their weighting, the share of the total mark each factor carries. Where the buyer may negotiate, the RC says so.

Acte d'engagement (AE)

The acte d'engagement, or commitment form, is the document in which the supplier commits to carry out the contract on the terms of its offer, price included. It is one of the few DCE files that goes back to the buyer, completed, as part of the offer.

CCAP and CCTP

The CCAP (cahier des clauses administratives particulières) holds the special administrative terms of this contract, such as payment, deadlines and penalties. The CCTP (cahier des clauses techniques particulières) is the technical specification, setting out what is to be delivered or done and to what standard. A fuller entry on the CCTP covers its contents. The supplier reads both rather than filling them in, since together they describe the contract it would be signing. Where the CCAP refers to a CCAG (cahier des clauses administratives générales), a set of general terms for a category of contract, that document sits outside the DCE.

Price schedules (BPU, DQE and DPGF)

The price schedules are the forms the supplier fills in with its prices. A BPU (bordereau des prix unitaires) lists unit prices. A DQE (détail quantitatif estimatif) applies those unit prices to estimated quantities. A DPGF (décomposition du prix global et forfaitaire) breaks a single fixed price down into its parts. Under Entreprendre Service Public's guide to the offer, the financial offer must be built on the price documents the DCE provides, so a supplier fills in the schedules given rather than sending its own price list.

What the supplier sends back

A supplier answers a DCE with a separate response file, not with the DCE itself. Every response to a French public contract has two parts, an application and an offer, as Entreprendre Service Public's page on the application sets out.

Take a small office-cleaning firm answering an appel d'offres, a call for tenders, from a local authority. It downloads the DCE from the buyer profile, the online platform where the authority publishes its tenders, and finds an RC, an AE, a CCAP, a CCTP, a BPU and a DQE. It reads only the RC, the CCAP and the CCTP, which tell it how to respond and what the contract would require. It completes the AE, the BPU and the DQE, because those go back with its offer.

Its application comes first. The firm presents itself on the DC1 and DC2 forms or on the DUME (document unique de marché européen), the French version of the European single procurement document. The application tells the buyer who the firm is and whether it has the capacity to take on the contract.

Its offer follows. It holds the mémoire technique, or technical brief, in which the firm explains how it will meet the authority's need. Beside it sit the financial offer, built on the completed BPU and DQE, the completed AE and any other document the RC asks for.

None of this becomes part of the DCE. The buyer's files say what is wanted, and the firm's own documents, plus the few forms the buyer supplied for completion, say what it offers. Planning and producing that response across every file is the work of tender management.

When the buyer answers questions about the DCE

Before the deadline, suppliers can send the buyer clarification questions about anything unclear in the DCE, and the buyer's answers go out to suppliers as additional information on the documents. In France's formalised procedures (those used for larger contracts), the Code de la commande publique requires the buyer to send that information at least six days before the offer deadline, provided the supplier asked in good time.

A late question may get no answer before offers are due.

The DCE a supplier downloads on the first day therefore does not show the full picture by the deadline. Answers to questions, and any other information the buyer adds about the documents, sit alongside the original files and can change how a response meets a requirement. A response written only from the first download can miss them. Framing a question so the answer is useful is covered in tender clarification questions.

How a DCE differs from related terms

DCE is the older, everyday name for the pack, while French law now uses documents de la consultation, and English-speaking markets have their own names for the same set. None of these names changes what a supplier reads or returns.

Documents de la consultation

French public procurement law now uses documents de la consultation, defined as all the documents the buyer provides or refers to in order to define its need and describe the procedure, including the contract notice. The legal term is slightly wider than the files in the download, since it includes the notice and documents such as a CCAG that are referred to but not attached. DCE, and its short form dossier de consultation, remain in everyday use, and Entreprendre Service Public still introduces the newer term as what was formerly the DCE.

Tender packs outside France

In England, under the Procurement Act 2023, the counterpart of a DCE is the tender notice together with the associated tender documents. Elsewhere in English-language bid work, the same set is commonly called the tender pack or tender documents, with the instructions to bidders playing the RC's role and the specification the CCTP's. French tender documents are therefore a fair English rendering of DCE. Outside public procurement, DCE is also used in private construction for the pack a buyer or main contractor sends to the firms it invites to price the work.