Is Your Business Ready to Submit Public Tenders?

Public tender competitions can be a great opportunity for businesses looking to expand their market and secure stable income. To succeed, you need not only a thorough understanding of the tender process, but also to be sure that your business meets all necessary requirements and criteria. In this article, we'll explore three important areas you should evaluate to ensure your business is ready for public tenders.

Take an Objective Assessment of Capacity and Resources!

Before preparing a tender, it's important to assess whether your business has the capacity to handle the assignment. This involves looking at staffing, technology, and finances, and asking questions such as: Do you have enough employees with the right skills to carry out the assignment? Do you need new technology or internal training to deliver the service? Does the business have sufficient financial resources to complete the project, including any delays in payments from the public sector?

A rule of thumb in the industry is that your business should stay within contracts worth 3x annual revenue. This level indirectly indicates that you have both the finances and the capacity to carry out the assignment. Even if these two things are in place, it's still critical to have the necessary expertise within the company. In some tender competitions, the use of subcontractors is permitted, which provides additional flexibility for you as a supplier submitting a proposal. If subcontractors are not allowed, there will often be fewer businesses that can deliver on the tender.

Some suppliers we've spoken with have found that it can be wise to stay away from certain tenders, even if the business is formally qualified to win. This is mainly about avoiding taking on too much and losing focus from the business's core operations. Remember that if you submit a proposal in a public tender competition, you are legally obligated to deliver according to your proposal.

Does Your Business Meet the Qualification Requirements and Award Criteria?

For your proposals to be evaluated by the procurer, it's crucial that your business meets all relevant qualification requirements. These requirements can encompass everything from documenting experience with similar projects, specific certification requirements, or robust finances with requirements ranging from credit assessments with a given credit score to financial key figures demonstrating good liquidity.

The requirements can vary between each individual tender competition and procurer, so it's important to be thorough when reviewing the requirements. A good practice is to conduct a critical self-assessment against the qualification requirements before you start writing your proposal, so you don't waste valuable time.

Understanding the award criteria is also important, as they determine how the contracting authorities will evaluate and rank the proposals. This can include criteria such as price, quality, environmental considerations, or innovation. We recommend being aware of what your business excels at and leveraging this when choosing tenders. Suppliers operate with different margins, and for some it can be difficult to compete on price. In such cases, it may be more relevant to pursue tenders that weigh other elements like quality or innovation more heavily.

Is Your Business Ready to Meet Environmental and Climate Requirements?

Environmental and climate considerations are becoming increasingly important in public procurement. Many contracting authorities now place great emphasis on how businesses can contribute to sustainable solutions. To be competitive, you must document how your business manages the environmental impact of its work and delivers products and services with a lower carbon footprint.

For example, this can include everything from where your business sources its energy to the use of environmentally friendly materials and supply chains. Check out this article about how the new rules for climate and environmental considerations affect your company.

Cobrief Helps You Prepare

To ensure your business is well-equipped to compete for public tenders, it can be useful to use a tool like Cobrief. With our AI tender tool, you can find, evaluate, and write tenders in a way you might not have thought possible. We scan through the entire tender documentation in seconds and provide a full overview of the tender.

We automatically find all qualification requirements and describe exactly what is required and how compliance should be documented.

Complex award criteria are no problem. Cobrief finds all criteria, sub-criteria, and describes how the criteria will be evaluated by the procurer.