Consulting Journal: Bid management

Bid management: The first steps

by David Blakey

These are not the first steps that you will take under a proper bid management strategy. But they will help to explain how bid management works.

[Monday 10 December 2001]

These are not the first steps that you will take under a proper bid management strategy. But they will help to explain how bid management works.

When a request to bid arrives from a prospect, the bid manager should break it into a set of components and issue the components to various people for their attention.

Preparation

Given enough time before the request actually arrives, the bid manager should quickly work out a vision of what the request will look like and then find appropriate people to deal with each part of it.

This process will be assisted by the existence of a requests model. The bid manager will be able to see whether requests from prospects usually contain standard components or if a large amount is unique to each request. The bid manager can then guess what the new request will look like, and may able to put together a rough model of the request, based on the format and content of those previous requests.

Receipt

The bid management process should include the procedure for managing the receipt of requests.

The way in which requests can be managed will vary depending on the format of the request and the bidder's own technical infrastructure.

Paper requests

When the request arrives as a printed document, the bid manager should attempt to obtain an electronic copy from the prospect. If the electronic copy can be obtained quickly, by email, then the following steps can be omitted. If an electronic copy will not be available, or if it will take more than one working day to arrive, the bid manager should do one of the following.

Network solution

The document can be scanned, either as images or as input to an application that will convert it to text. The choice will depend on the facilities available on the business's network and also on the nature of the request document.

Conversion to text is a good solution for a document that contains few graphics.

Capture as images is better if the document has a large number of graphics that are essential to an understanding of the request.

The document can then be placed as a read-only document on the business's intranet or issued as an attachment to an email.
Non-network solution

The request can be photocopied and distributed.

Evaluation

However the document is distributed, the people who will be responsible for evaluating the request will be told:

which parts of the request they will examine;
what the nature of their evaluation is expected to be; and
when they will be expected to present their evaluation.

Which parts?

Every part of the request must be evaluated by at least one person, other than the bid manager. This includes any preambles or instructions that do not form part of the request to which the bidder is required to respond.

More than one person may evaluate some parts.

The easiest way to divide the request into sections for evaluation is to imagine having a single printed copy and tearing it up. If there is a section that is entirely technical, it can be ‘ripped out’ and passed to a technical evaluator. If there is a section on financial matters, it can be ‘ripped out’ and passed to a financial evaluator. Eventually, there will be only the introduction and the instruction sections, and these can be passed to an ‘approach’ evaluator.

In practice, a single copy will not be ripped up in this way, but it is useful for the bid manager to mark each section of the request as pass ed to an evaluator, to make sure that nothing gets missed.

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