Plan A takes a new approach to winning infrastructure tenders

Tenders for contracting and infrastructure projects have become more and more complex and demanding in the last few years.

Tendering authorities, particularly government organisations, have recognised that a decision to use the cheapest-price operator without a detailed look at how well they will do the job can leave them not only big bucks worse off, but also with compliance problems that can be serious.

Their answer has been to increase the scrutiny and impact of non-price attributes within the procurement process – and that makes things competitive in whole new areas for those responding.

Put simply, while price is always an important factor in evaluation, the differences in prices submitted by tenderers is now often quite small. Suddenly, those companies who can put together a persuasive case that shows their understanding of the risks and critical success factors of a project – alongside their proven capabilities for delivering in that environment – have an edge that means business for procurement teams. Plan A takes a new approach to winning infrastructure tenders Tenders for contracting and infrastructure projects have become more and more complex and demanding in the last few years.

Know-how is not enough

Although many companies have a genuinely strong base of successful projects, good people, resources and knowhow that’s been proven in the past, it’s not always easy to capture that information in a manner that pushes tender evaluators’ buttons.

The truth is that not many construction organisations have internal managers with the skills that are needed to communicate their competitive edge really well, within a written tender document. And – let’s face it – most of them really don’t enjoy the process of putting a bid together.

Evaluators constantly complain that the questions are not answered (or not answered in appropriate depth); that the information is hard to find and even harder to understand; and the job of comparing tender responses is made difficult by poor-quality responses.

One company has found a solution to this. With more than 12 years’ experience as an independent tender preparation company, Plan A is New Zealand’s comfortable leader in the niche area of writing tenders for infrastructure construction and maintenance contractors.

“Tendering has become a very specialist skill,” explains company founder Caroline Boot. “A tender is fundamentally a very technical marketing document. While most of our clients have very skilled engineers and managers who can pull together an excellent plan for construction or maintenance of infrastructure in their areas, there are not many who have the in-depth knowledge of tendering processes and documentation that’s needed to develop a winning proposal.”

A unique blend of skills

Over the past 12 months, the pool of tender specialists at Plan A has more than doubled to meet increased demand. However, the company is careful to select people with a very tight skillset, together with significant senior management experience, and then train them rigorously to meet high performance standards.

To produce a compelling tender document, they need to be able to get to grips with the project’s specific critical success factors and the competitive advantage that’s needed – within a wide range of industries and business models. Then they need to work long hours to put those win themes into writing, in a manner that’s crafted carefully to give the evaluation team solid substantiation that this is the best – and only – tender that they can responsibly accept. This takes a unique blend of skills. “Plan A’s consultants all have many years of engineering and/or management experience, coupled with advanced skills in document management and report writing, and the ability to get to grips with new business situations in quick order,” Caroline explains. “Then there’s the ability to churn out work under pressure, superior facilitation skills that draw out the best that the bid contributors can offer to the project, not to mention the stamina and family tolerance needed for projects that run late at night and through the weekend, when needed.

“We also give our tender writers an in-depth understanding of tender evaluation processes – gained not only from responding to tenders, but also attending debriefs, facilitating workshops with evaluators, and industry evaluation training. We have found that we have no place for many people who are keen to join us who only have writing or journalistic skills – it takes a lot more to cut it in our business.”

And Plan A is surely cutting it. The company’s track record of winning tenders indicates without a doubt that Plan A tenders are some of the best around. This has put the business in hot demand with contracting and infrastructure companies throughout New Zealand, as well as some in Australia, South America, Europe, the USA, and Asia.

Just in the last two months, for example, Plan A has had very positive feedback from evaluators from NZTA, KiwiRail and city councils. In some cases, this feedback has enabled Plan A’s clients to win the business, despite quite significantly higher prices for the work than their competitors.

Fitting in with the customer’s team

Plan A’s consultants work in various ways, depending on their clients’ needs. They can work remotely or within a client company’s offices; manage the preparation of whole tender or just parts of it; peer review or shadow evaluate; and provide solid training to clients’ internal staff on current best practices in tendering.

Where companies already have some expertise in writing tenders and just need help for their internal team, Plan A steps in wherever help is needed. That may be, for example, in the form of:

• facilitating bid strategy and capturing it in a compelling executive summary
• supporting the development of the written tender response
• graphic design of the deliverables
• writing CVs
• peer reviewing and shadow evaluating a tender when it’s in its final stages.

The company is tightly focused on delivering value for money. A core value is dedication to using clients’ internal resources where it’s cost-effective, and transferring Plan A’s extensive knowledge of how to write tenders in ways that maximise the wins for their clients. “It gives us great satisfaction when our customers are able to use the tools we provide in-house,” Caroline says. m m m m m Caroline Boot “Many companies are able to lift their game to the point that smaller bids are easily handled by their own personnel, and we only need to provide help on the larger or more strategic bids.”

Finding the most cost-effective solution

Other companies have found that it’s more costeffective to use Plan A to put together all their bids, rather than maintain an in-house capability.

Although in-house tender writers and coordinators are undoubtedly very useful for some organisations, it’s difficult for those employees to keep up to date with best practice in tendering. It also can be very difficult to find the manpower to put together several tenders if they all land on you at once. That’s when extra specialist help really comes into its own.

With successful tenders in the past year totalling many hundreds of million dollars in revenue for their clients, the investment that Plan A’s clients are placing in expert assistance for tendering is clearly paying off.

The procurement environment is changing fast, and with those changes, companies are taking a long, hard look at the way they manage preparation of tenders. Putting together winning tenders takes more effort and more skill than ever before – and this trend looks set to continue.

There’s an old saying that the cost of winning a tender is nothing when you compare it with the cost of losing one. One thing is for sure – the bar will continue to rise, and the companies that stay ahead in the tendering game will always be the ones that work hard to find the best ways to win business. For further information, freephone 0800 PLAN AA (752 622) or visit www.plana.co.nz/tenders