eWorks is Live: Digitalising Suitability Assessments for Public Works in Ireland

A new digital platform to simplify suitability assessments for public works procurement in Ireland.

eWorks, the new digital platform for the Capital Works Management Framework (CWMF), is now live. The launch was announced on 6 July 2026 by the Minister for Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation, Jack Chambers TD.

It builds on the work redeveloping the CWMF website, launched last year in October 2025 as the home for CWMF guidance, contracts and resources.

From static Word documents to a structured digital process

The Suitability Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) is a core part of how Ireland’s public works competitions work. It’s used to assess whether applicants have the financial standing, technical capacity and statutory capability required to take part in a public works competition, before a contracting authority moves forward with them. eWorks currently covers the digitalisation of the SAQ, along with the Instructions to Tenderers (ITT) documents used under the open procedure.

Until now, that process has run on a suite of Word document forms: separate questionnaires for restricted and open procedures, for works and works-related services, specialist supplements for particular contract types, and accompanying health and safety documentation. Each version has its own structure, criteria and evaluation logic, completed and assessed manually by contracting authorities and applicants alike.

eWorks moves that process onto a structured digital platform, connected to eTenders Ireland, the national public procurement platform where these competitions are published and run. It wasn’t a matter of just copying the simple format conversion: it meant working through each questionnaire type in detail, resolving inconsistencies between different versions and procedure types, and rebuilding the underlying logic behind each form as structured digital data rather than static text in a document.

Inside the platform

eWorks is built around two distinct user experiences, one for contracting authorities and one for applicants, each with tailored sections and a dashboard designed around the tasks that matter most to them.

Both sides benefit from dedicated support tools, including guided walkthroughs and resources, to make the transition to digital SAQs as smooth as possible.

The technology behind eWorks

eWorks is built as a secure, cloud-hosted application with a Django-backed architecture. Each SAQ is broken down into a multi-step submission workflow, with responsive Jinja2 templates and custom client-side JavaScript validation guiding applicants through the process and catching errors before submission, rather than leaving that to a manual review further down the line. The platform is built to national accessibility standards throughout.

The CWMF website itself runs on the same Django and Jinja2 foundation, within a Wagtail CMS that gives DPER’s internal team the flexibility to manage and update content independently as the framework evolves.

What it means in practice

For applicants, the shift to structured data means information and supporting evidence can be reused across competitions rather than resubmitted from scratch each time. A financial statement, an insurance certificate, or a statutory declaration entered once no longer needs to be retyped into the next SAQ, and the same client-side validation that catches errors before submission also means fewer applications bounced back over avoidable formatting or completeness issues.

For contracting authorities, it means every SAQ arrives in the same structured format rather than as a variably completed Word document, making assessments faster to process and easier to compare consistently across applicants. Because that data is now structured rather than locked in individual documents, it also builds up a clearer, queryable picture of the public works procurement landscape over time, something a static document-based system was never able to offer.

What’s next

eWorks is available now at eworks.gov.ie and via the CWMF website. Word document versions of the SAQ will remain available for a one year transition period, after which all SAQs will be managed through eWorks. Online tutorials and practical guidance are available to support the rollout.

This is the first phase of an ongoing project, and there’s more to come as eWorks continues to develop.

Read the official announcement from the CWMF on the eWorks launch.