By Kate Burrows
Mike is a Safety Manager at a large engineering consultancy firm.
Mike hasn’t been home ‘on time’ all week.
He is desperate to join the family for dinner tonight.
But first he has to submit a response to a tender question for a Request for Tender (RFT).
The government client is wanting to procure engineering services for a road construction project. Mike’s question is asking for an overview of the company’s safety management system (SMS).
Mike knows he has provided an answer to an identical question in a recent tender, which the company happened to win.
He cuts and pastes the relevant bits from the earlier proposal and puts them in the template for this RFT.
He changes the name of the client and some of the information which is no longer current. He adds some content that reflects the current project.
Mike does a quick read over his response and hits the send button. He is pretty pleased that he managed to do it so efficiently and effectively, and that he can make it home in time before his children go to bed.
But Mike arrives at work the next day to an email from his boss, asking him to rewrite his response to meet the compliance requirements of the tender.
“What compliance requirements?†he asks himself.
“I’ve answered the question, and we won that previous tender. What more do I need to do?â€
Mike’s problem is that he skipped one of the critical parts of preparing a tender response.
And it is a problem that I see in tendering time and time again.
In each tender, the client identifies compliance elements that will make your proposal non-conforming and potentially put your company out of contention if you don’t address them.
They could be as simple as not following the ‘rules’ of the tender, such as the required format of the response document, or not submitting the tender on time.
But they also cover the requirements that are listed in the contract and or specification in the tender that outline how the good or services are to be delivered and to what standards.
In Mike’s case, the contract stipulated the SMS had to comply with certain statutory and regulatory requirements, which weren’t addressed in his answer.
In fact, he had the wrong regulatory requirements included in his response.
Mike’s response also didn’t include information about the safety policies and procedures that are required to form part of the SMS, as outlined in the specification.
While he thought he answered the question by providing an overview of the SMS, Mike’s answer was not compliant with the tender requirements.
So how does Mike even know where to look in the tender document for the compliance elements that relate to his question?
The first place is in the draft contract and or specification if the tender includes these documents.
Mike should have searched these documents for references to the SMS and identified what he needed to address in his question to make sure his answer was compliant with the requirements.
Had Mike completed the Develop and Write Winning Tender Content Certificate, he would have been provided with a step-by-step process that helped him to:
- Identify the compliance requirements for his tender
- Determine if his company was able to meet the requirements
- Build a story that demonstrates to the client how the requirement will be met over the term of the contract.
It would have meant more time planning his response at the front end, but a more time efficient and productive outcome than having to rewrite his original answer.
The Develop and Write Winning Tender Content Certificate empowers business professionals like Mike to avoid common mistakes and improves the value of their contribution to the tender team.
It also means they can spend more time doing the things that matter the most, like spending more time with the family.
“Where do I register,” asks Mike?!
