In today’s fast-paced business landscape, time is precious. As organisations strive to maximise productivity and optimise resources, it’s crucial to ensure your tendering process is highly efficient.
Tendering requires a substantial amount of documentation, ranging from response documents, legal forms to detailed appendices and attachments. The sheer volume of paperwork can be overwhelming and time-consuming to manage.
Using technology to manage streamlined documentation and tracking practices can significantly reduce time, allowing you to focus on what truly matters.
As professional bid and tender managers, we have three key areas of focus when it comes to supporting successful tenders. These are preparation, collaboration and decisive governance.
Preparation
Preparation is the key to success in anything, and tendering is no exception. There is great value in investing sufficient time for response planning. This involves a detailed analysis to understand the requirements and outline these clearly as a briefing for all tender contributors. This allows you to pick up on the small details and ensure a compliant response that meets all criteria.
Collaboration
Collaboration and communication are critical components of tendering success. However, miscommunication, delays in response times, and lack of clarity can create confusion and hamper progress.
Fostering a culture of open communication is important to minimise misunderstandings and streamline the tendering process. Tendup focuses on three critical collaboration functions to support tender teams. These are:
1: Checkpoints: establishing and maintaining checkpoint streams that allow contributors to come together at a regular cadence and hold accountability for response items
2: Collaborative tools: utilising collaboration tools including shared documents and a clearly marked document storage hub to allow all contributors convenient access to any relevant supporting materials, as well as a real-time view of the draft response
3: Tracking: a single source of tracking for the entire proposal, outlining each piece of criteria, the response owner, current status of the response and defined due dates.
Establishing and maintaining clear lines of communication within your team provides an essential foundation to a high-quality response.
Decisive governance
The tendering process often involves waiting for internal responses, evaluations, or contract approvals. Prolonged decision-making can be a significant time waster.
By proactively managing your internal stakeholders, holding teams accountable to the response timing plans and ensuring you have a clear understanding of the requisite approval processes, you can limit the last-minute issues that can propel tenders into panic mode. A hot tip is to create a calendar booking with your tender deed or declaration signatory well in advance, as these senior authorisers can often be unavailable at the last minute.
In the competitive world of tendering, time is an asset that should be used wisely. By identifying and addressing the top time wasters in the tendering process, you can set yourself up for a more successful response while also minimising the stress and overwhelm that can come with bids and tenders. Embracing documentation practices, thorough preparation, effective communication, efficient review strategies, and proactive decision-making are all important contributors to provide a solid foundation for a successful tender response.
Tendup offers a range of services to support your bid journeys. Talk to us about how we can help take your tender or proposal to the next level.
