Everything you need to know about Tendering Other Services

Since you are here, you must be wanting to get a lot of knowledge about tendering. This topic has always been rarely opened by people, but when it is, people expect to go through each and every point.

In this article, we will be discussing everything about tendering.

What is a Tender?

A Tender is an offer proposed to any goods or services. It is a submission made by a supplier to a prospective customer to consider or buy their goods and services. The customer may be receiving hundreds of tenders daily, and thus the design, content, and management is a necessary aspect of a good tender.

Types of Tenders:

There are 4 basic types of tenders, each explained in brief below:

Open Tender:

Open tendering is usually the main tendering process considered by the government as well as private companies. Open tendering is basically allowing equal opportunities to all vendors to supply a tender. Anyone can submit an open tender to any organization or company. Open tenders usually face a lot of competition, especially in the engineering and construction industry.

 Selective Tender:

Selective tendering, as the name suggests, allows the supplier to tender for goods or services only upon an invitation. There are various factors kept in mind while inviting suppliers to process a tender, such as previous track record, size, nature, and complexity of the work. The competition steadily decreases in selective tendering as only a select group of suppliers is invited to tend.

 Negotiated Tender:

Negotiated Tenders is basically a process of negotiating a single supplier for a highly specialist contract, or expansion of an existing contract. It is extensively used in engineering, IT as well as the construction industry and also plays a major role in the setting up of these industries.

 Single Stage and Two-Stage Tender:

In single-stage tendering, an invitation is sent to the supplier who prepares and returns the tenders within a certain period of time, a preferred tender is selected among the group and then negotiations may apply if necessary.

Two-stage tendering is an early appointment of the supplier through a tender. It is done prior to the completion of all the information which finalizes to a fixed price. A limited appointment is necessary for the first stage, and in the second stage, a fixed price is negotiated as per the contract.

What is the Tendering Process? 

There are various tendering processes considered in the market in modern times, basically varying on factors like requirements of an organization, the bidding platform and the expectations of the supplier. The basic process of tendering is preparing a tender as per the client's requirements and sending them through the client's platform.

Tendering can be done through various platforms in case of open tendering, or through the vendor's selective platform, in case of any other type of tender.

After a successful bid or tender is placed, the supplier will be asked a few sets of questions. The questions are basically for the evaluation process among hundreds of different tenders.

In some cases, suppliers are also expected to provide some evidence for the content mentioned in the tender or for the criteria decided by the vendor. If one meets all the criteria set forth by the client, he will be selected to another round of the selection process.

The other round may include several things. You could be asked to present yourself openly in front of people and explain your tender in detail. You could be asked to write a 100-word answer or a 600-word essay describing any information the vendor would like to know. You may also be expected to make a presentation and perform it on-site to discuss the criteria set by the vendor. In some rare cases, suppliers are also expected to read out or present relevant case studies to prove the worth of their tender.

These are the general rules or standards of a selection of worthful tenders among a million others. The buyer has the right to judge the performance of a particular supplier to select him or her for the betterment of his company. This may be a very big opportunity to the suppliers and hence, they are expected to come with each and everything prepared beforehand. The best price-quality ratio has always been difficult to select or understood by even the bigger vendors and buyers, and thus one cannot just understand the quality of a vendor based on a simple set of criteria provided by the buyer.

Publication of Tenders

There are various portals online for the publication of tenders, such as tendersontime.com, globaltenders.com, etc.

While selecting the right platform to publish your tender, one must notice the quality and quantity of the presence of the portal online. In worse quality cases, there may not be any prospective buyers to look out for open tenders on the portal. On a quantity basis, if the portal is not active worldwide, your tender will be restricted to a local audience which will further reduce the leads. You can also post region-wise tenders or country wise tenders based upon your target audience and service, but it is always advised to first study your market and your business and then decide upon tendering conditions.

There may still be hundreds of rules and regulations mentioned on various websites and blogs to prepare the "perfect" tender, but what we believe is, no one can prepare a perfect tender other than you. There are no rules to a perfect tender, it just depends on the understanding and truthfulness of the supplier.

So next time you tender, just be open to various thoughts and go ahead.

Happy tendering!