I recently have provided tender assistance for a business with the submission of a bid to provide IT services to an organisation..
At first glance the tender documentation seemed relatively straightforward. The requirements were listed in a couple places in the tender, so it appeared to be just a task of addressing these, in order, and formulating the response.
However, it was not that simple! The second list repeated aspects of the questions in the first list – but expressed differently, and requiring conflicting information. Not only that, but additional requirements were sprinkled throughout the document, and again requiring conflicting information. At least there was only one document. (In other cases I have come across additional documents, sometimes embedded within extraneous documents, that contain response requirements.)
So the task became one, initially of, organising the requirements, summarising them, and arranging a format that was compliant with the response requirements. Fortunately, in this case, the business owner came to me with plenty of time to get the response organised and provide the needed tender assistance. I have experienced instances of being faced with similar circumstances but with much less time available to respond. This is a little more challenging, but not necessarily unachievable. It is in cases like this that it is helpful to have the experience of having dealt with a vast array of tender responses. Having seen the way that tender documentation can become confused and misleading it is easier to be able to untangle it all.
But this is life, and this situation can arise for a number of reasons. Sometimes invitations to tender can be assembled by committee – and various committee members will have similar, but subtly different requirements. Sometimes the tender document will have been based on an earlier one – with a copy and paste job having been done on it – with lots of mistakes left in.
Either way it will need to be addressed systematically – and getting some tender assistance from a specialist can be a good idea.
If you would like to know more about how we an help with a tender please contact us.