Tender process

The most common cause of difficulty is the failure of managers to take full account of the decision-making processes in their organisation. For example, one company started the process of appointing a consultant in August to have a major facilities management contract in place and operating by 1 April, following selective competitive tendering. Within two weeks the decision was taken to delay the start of the new contract by a year, because the organisation’s decision- making structure could not cope with the decision dates that were necessary to achieve the original start date. Therefore it is vital to ensure that your planning allows realistically for such factors.

Make sure, too, that you give the companies you invite time to understand your requirements and prepare an effective response. There is no use sending out tender invitations of encyclopaedic proportions for complex facilities management and expecting good tenders to be submitted two or four weeks later. Even the EU Directives allow 6 weeks (42 working days) for the return of tenders and I emphasise that is the minimum. Remember that you are familiar with your requirements and will probably have spent weeks if not months preparing the documents. Before determining how long to allow for the return of the tenders, think about how long you would need, or have needed, to gain from scratch an understanding that will permit the construction of a sound tender to provide the work. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that you might need to allow two, three or more months for tenders to be prepared.

If there is one certainty about the tendering business it is that, no matter how carefully you have prepared the documents, someone will interpret them differently from the way you had intended. Effective communication with the tendering companies is therefore essential during the tender period. That calls for good management to ensure not only that the correct information is given to tenderers, but also that your own time and involvement is effectively managed.

Tenderers will want and need to visit the site(s) on which the services are to be provided. You will also want them to do so , but you cannot cope with random approaches and visits. Set aside a day and time for a site visit and information meeting to which all tenderers are invited. On large and complex sites it might be necessary to handle the visit and the meeting on different days. By controlling the numbers of representatives, the whole visiting process is kept more manageable.

Question time

Having all tenderers present at a meeting where they can raise queries and receive answers has the benefit of clearly demonstrating equality of treatment and information to all involved – everyone hears the questions and the answers. This arrangement does not preclude any individual company arranging further visits and raising other queries. You must, however, ensure that any other queries and their answers should be recorded and circulated to all tenderers and to the customer’s evaluation team. Such dissemination of information should not attribute the source of the queries.

A practical point is exactly how you want tenders submitted as this facilitates the task of evaluation. There is likely to be a large quantity of paper that needs to be copied to those who are involved in the evaluation of tenders. Consider issuing tenders and having them returned on disk. This will dramatically reduce the quantity of paper received and will certainly make it easier to distribute copies. There should of course be one printed copy of the tender as a benchmark to guard against the mishaps that can occur in working with disks.

According to form

I have dealt earlier with preparing a form of tender* and most organisations have established procedures for the return of tenders, their receipt and safe keeping until they are opened. Such procedures are usually the preserve of an organisation’s procurement department. Often, however, the role played by a procurement department is limited; in some it is non-existent and the managers who are involved in the procurement process have scant knowledge of the proper procedures.

The message is simple; find out what your organisation’s procedures are and, if there are none, get good professional support to set some up. It is vital that tender receipt procedures are understood, because failure to carry them out effectively can lead to legal action (see Blackpool and Fylde Aero Club v Blackpool Borough Council).

Think about some simple measures to ensure that tenders are easily recognised as such if they are received in the post. Consider printing special tender return labels for tenderers to use on envelopes and packages, so that when they are received they are not opened, but set securely aside until the time scheduled for all tenders to be opened. Labels should bear the reference allocated to the tender and the scheduled return date, but should not reveal the identity of the company submitting the tender.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the tender opening is to be able to demonstrate that all tenders submitted by the appointed time on the scheduled day have been opened and recorded without any collusion between the customer and any of the tenderers.

Whether you work in the public or private sector, the process by which tenders are opened, recorded and then evaluated must be able to withstand the most searching audit scrutiny.