We have been analysing tender data published in our tender notification service over the past two years. In this article we try to make sense of Tender Briefing Sessions and get to understand what potential bidders can expect. We considered two main aspects:

1. The notice period between the Tender Publication Date and the Tender Briefing Date.
2. The preparation period between the Briefing Session and the Tender Closing Date.

Observations

• 49.2% of all tenders do not have any briefing session.
• It is most common that tenders are published 7 days before the briefing although the average notice period is 8.9 days.
• Almost 1% of tenders are published on the same day of the briefing.
• The preparation period is most often 13 or 14 days with the average being 15.2 days. This then roughly allows two week after the briefing session to prepare your bid. It is important to note though that these are just averages with significant variances.
• These findings are in line with our previous view that you have 21 days to respond to a tender. Now we have seen that that is generally broken down into 7 days notice period and 14 days preparation period before closing.

Implications for potential bidders

Where there is no briefing session it places the onus on potential bidders to collect tender documents in sufficient time to study requirements and submit any questions for clarification before the deadline.

With more than 20% of notice periods between 6 and 10 days it means that potential bidders mostly have 7-9 days to find the tender notice, collect the set of tender documents and plan to attend the briefing.

It may seem impossible that so many briefing sessions take place on the same day that the tender is published. We attribute this to the fact that officials often underestimate the lead time to publication. It will be prudent to raise a complaint with the contact person immediately when you realise this and not to wait days before raising the flag.

The real danger lies in the 14.3% of tenders with a notice period of 5 days and less. A large percentage of these tenders do represent smaller transactions and generally close shortly after the briefing session too. However, it provides very little space to get someone ready to attend the meeting. Considering the wide range of tender publication sources it becomes virtually impossible to notice all these opportunities without the use of a professional tender notification service.

The majority of briefing sessions are compulsory and if you miss that session you may as well wave the opportunity good bye. Few organisations will waive the requirement to be present at the meeting.

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In short it is critical to keep a close eye on tender notices to prevent missing out on opportunities. One always wants to have the freedom to choose which of those you want to spend your time on and not have to regret that one missed chance that could have made the big difference.

In our next post we will provide more context on Tender Briefing Sessions and future trends for this practice.

About MarketSqr Tender Notification Service

Subscribers get daily e-mail notifications for tenders in their line of business. MarketSqr consolidates tender notification information from tender portals, tender bulletins, newspapers and web sites every day. This information is then filtered and a summary is e-mailed to subscribers every morning. If subscribers follow a tender they are interested the important dates relating to the tender will be added to the subscriber’s Tender Calendar. Tenders can be accessed via the website or any mobile device.

Visit: MarketSqr Tender Notification Service