Broaden your business chops with a basic Bidx bexplanier.
If you're like me, you probably know that Bidx is a platform for... bidding on construction... stuff. There's a lot of jargon being thrown around and sometimes you just sorta tune it out. It's amazing how long you can spend working on a project without the big picture of what people do with it.
Our resident Bidx library David did a deep dive with us on the finer points of the workflow that was eye opening to say the least. To help digest all that knowledge, I've attempted to write up a high level overview of the letting process in chronological order. With any luck you can wrap your head around it a lot faster than I could.
Proposals and the Players
The main idea: agencies solicit work from their contractors in the form of proposals, which contain many individual work items that need to be completed for a project. Contractors place bids on proposals, stating their price for each item and submitting them to the soliciting agency.
Good so far? Let's keep going. In order to bid with an agency a business or contractor must be registered with that agency as a vendor by completing a request to bid. To bid online, they have to obtain a digital id from Infotech to verify their submissions. An agency might set additional requirements for each proposal, such as being labeled a plan holder or eligible bidder.
So what's a plan holder then? Well, proposals often include plans, as in documents that detail the nature of the work that needs doing. If a contractor is interested in the work then they probably want to download those documents and review them, hence the name plan holders!
Bidx keeps track of who downloaded plans and provides that data to the agency. They use that info as well as vendors who got the plans on paper and upload a list of plan holders to the service. The uploaded plan holders list from the agency can include bidders and prime contractors as well as other vendors that are interested, such as subcontractors and suppliers. The agency may also mark certain vendors on the plan holders list as eligible bidders which allows them to restrict bidding even further, but more on that in a second.
Some agencies also allow vendors to self identify as a voluntary plan holder. That allows them to indicate they're interested in the proposal even if they didn't see the plans or weren't included in the list. A subcontractor might do this to encourage prime contractors who are bidding to solicit them for work.
Now that Bidx is tracking all these lists of vendors, the agency can choose to restrict bidding to certain groups. They can allow anyone to bid, or only plan holders, or just the subset of plan holders marked eligible.
Basics of Bidding
Okay, we know who all the players are now. The next step is bidding, which doesn't actually happen in Bidx right now. All you need to know is that bids are a secret to everyone including the agency until all the bids are in.
There's of course a deadline to place your bids for a proposal. The agencies bundle one or more proposals into a letting, and the deadline for vendors to place their bids is the letting date. The agency then opens the bids on the opening date which is the first time they can see them. The opening date is often immediately after the letting date, but optionally can be a delayed opening.
Either way, once the bids are opened a lot of things can happen at the agency's discretion. First of all, as soon as the bids are opened the agency will be able to look at the apparent bids. This is a preliminary list of all the vendors who submitted a bid, and the total amount they proposed. Agencies can add other bidders to this list if, for example, they bid on paper (eww). They can optionally publish the list so that it's visible to all users which may satisfy a legal requirement in their state.
The agency will go through these bid submissions and verify that they meet all the requirements before deciding who to award the winning bid. Once they've crunched the numbers outside of Bidx, they can choose to upload the bid tabulations, which list exactly what each vendor bid for each item in the proposal, as well as some other helpful metrics. When bid tabs are uploaded they're visible to everyone right away, and contractors with the Competitive Analysis, formerly Analysis Suite, add-on can view those extra metrics too.
Remember that all of the above can be done for each proposal in a letting at different times!
To Be Continued...?
That just about covers the basic features of the bidding process. As you can imagine there’s a lot of nuance to these rules, but if you understand this then you’re in good shape.
← Back to blog