You could be the best engineering firm for the job. And still lose the tender.
That’s hard to swallow when you consider the hours of estimating that went into the submission, let alone what the contract would have meant for your business.
We see engineering businesses doing work that deserves a much stronger place in their tenders. A team might have redesigned a component to extend its service life or found a way to reduce installation time during a shutdown. Often, that knowledge stays with the people who did the job, while the next submission goes out with the same company profile and equipment list.
The people evaluating your bid need to understand how that experience applies to their project. If your price is higher, you’re asking them to back that decision with evidence. You need to give them something they can use.
This is where the detail matters. Explaining how you achieved a specified tolerance or verified performance at commissioning gives an evaluator more to work with than a claim about quality. It helps them assess whether your proposed methodology will deliver what they need.
The commercial outcome needs to be in there too. If your approach shortened a shutdown, explain what that meant for production. If a component redesign reduced maintenance costs, show the savings over its service life. Put figures around it where you have the records to support them.
There’s real value in capturing this when a project finishes, while the people involved still remember the decisions and why they made them. When the next tender lands, you can spend your time addressing the evaluation criteria instead of trying to track down evidence from a job completed three years ago.
We want to see more of our engineering businesses winning work that reflects the level they operate at, and would hate to see a business miss out because its submission didn’t do the work justice.
Getting into a workshop and talking with the people behind that work is something we really enjoy at Naked. There’s usually a good story in how they solved the problem, and a commercial reason the next client should hear it… and you know we don’t usually do pitches – but we are here to help.
