Tenders Regulations – A Necessary Requirement

Tenders regulations are going to be a central part of any bid writing process. If you produce bids in response to government or institutional Invitation To Tenders (ITT’s) then you are going to be very constrained by tenders regulations.

Governments, charities and institutes, particularly those that use public funds will have the strictest tenders regulations. These must be followed and fully adhered to, as non compliance usually means that the bid will not be evaluated and there will be no award of contract.

These tender regulations are bought in to ensure that everything is fair and seen to be fair as well as ensuring that as many different types of companies can bid as possible. They typically include the following requirements:

• That the ITT is advertised in easily found areas for set times. This ensures that companies know where to find the ITT’s.
• That there is a defined format that every bidder has to follow when writing the bid. This is to ensure fairness.
• That all bids follow a Value for Money (VfM) criteria. This is to ensure that public money is best spent and no company can overly benefit from wining the tender.
• Life time costs are often evaluated to meet the VfM criteria.
• Maintenance and support contracts and training are often required to ensure that the organization is in the best position to use the resulting products and services.
• That all bidders are prequalified for financial stability. This is again to protect public money.
• That bribes, inducements and other unfair activities are totally banned. Again to provoke fairness in the bidding process.
• There may be several reviews of your company’s abilities as well as references taken up. This will be compulsory for all bidders. This protects the tendering company and is extremely common with governments.
• Individual workers on the contracts may have to pass reviews such as criminal record checks, drug testing etc. If your company does this regularly, any certificates would be useful.
• All relevant laws are followed. This usually includes employment, health & safety, discrimination laws. These are some of the standard documents that you can write before you bid.
• These types of organizations love quality certificates so the more you hold the better.

All bidders also have to produce the same information in the same format, which makes evaluation much fairer and quicker. Lengthy evaluations can take time and money and these tender regulations keep evaluation costs down.

Most evaluating agencies also have a set method of evaluating and scoring new bids. This also makes bidding much fairer as well as quicker to undertake. Savvy bidders know this and soon learn how to design their bids to take the best advantage of this knowledge.

Whilst you may think that tender regulations are irksome, they actually make writing a bid much fairer, quicker and yes, easier.

 

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