What Holds Up a Tender Submission (and How to Avoid It)

There is a particular kind of tender week that most bid teams will recognise.

The answers are written. The pricing is done. Everything that the team controls is finished with two days to spare. And the submission is still not ready, because the broker has not sent the insurance letter, a referee is on holiday, the accountant is busy with year-end, and the director who needs to sign the form of tender is on a site visit in another county.

None of these is difficult. Each one takes five minutes of somebody's time. The trouble is that it is somebody else's time, on somebody else's schedule.

Two kinds of task#

Every task in a bid falls into one of two kinds.

Work you control. Reading the pack, writing answers, building the price, reviewing drafts. It is hard work, but its timing is yours. Add people or hours and it goes faster.

Things you request. Documents, letters, quotes, confirmations and signatures that only somebody else can produce. Their timing belongs to the other person: their inbox, their workload, their holiday, their process. Adding people on your side does not make them faster.

Bid teams tend to schedule both kinds in the order they come across them while reading the pack. The writing starts on day one, because writing feels like progress. The request for the insurance letter goes out on day nine, when somebody reaches the contract schedule.

It should be the other way round. You can speed up your own work by putting more time into it. You can't speed up other people, so their part has to start first.

The usual suspects#

The specific items vary by tender and by sector, but the same handful turn up again and again.

Insurance evidence#

If the tender asks for more cover than you hold, you will need something from your broker or insurer, often a letter confirming the cover could be provided. Under the Procurement Act, a buyer generally cannot require contract insurance to be in place before award, but it can ask for evidence that you will be able to obtain it. That evidence still has to come from someone else.

Certification#

Certification is the slowest item on most lists, and the one most often discovered too late. The Home Office's SME/VCSE Bid Pack is blunt: “ISO certification can take several months depending on your organisation's size and readiness.” Its advice is to “build in time and budget early”.

The same applies to renewals. A certificate that expires during the tender is a bottleneck you could have seen coming months ago. In construction, the expiring documents inside a Common Assessment Standard certificate can cause the same problem.

Platform registration#

Under the Procurement Act, your company information lives on the central digital platform, and in an open or competitive flexible procedure the buyer must have your confirmation that it has been registered, submitted and shared before the end of the tendering period. If you rely on another company to meet a condition, or plan to sub-contract, their information matters too. Your own record is in your control. Your partners' records are not. See the PSQ explained.

Financial information#

Accounts, or the equivalent financial information smaller companies can provide instead of an audit, may need your accountant. If you rely on a parent company's financial standing, its accounts, and perhaps a guarantee, come from a different organisation with its own approvals.

References and case studies#

A reference needs a client who is willing, available and reachable. A case study may need a client's permission to be named. Both are favours, and favours run on the other person's timetable.

Partners and sub-contractors#

Quotes from sub-contractors take time, and they are pricing their part of your bid alongside their own work. For consortia, the Bid Pack notes that arrangements “must be in place before the submission deadline”, and agreeing roles, risks and costs between companies is rarely quick.

Signatures and approvals#

The form of tender, declarations, pricing sign-off and anything requiring a director's signature all depend on specific people being available. Work out on day one who must sign what, and when they will be around.

Clarification answers#

Even the buyer is a bottleneck. A clarification question asked on the last permitted day gets its answer whenever the buyer publishes it, possibly too late to use. Ask early, and ask well. The Bid Pack lists missed portal updates and clarification responses as a common pitfall, and recommends assigning “one person to track updates, deadlines and clarification responses”.

What to do on day one#

The fix is simple to describe and surprisingly rare in practice.

1. On day one, list every external dependency. Read the whole pack for things you will need from someone else, not just for things you will need to write. A quick first read for knockouts usually surfaces most of them.
2. Check when each one is needed. At submission, at award or at mobilisation? The Bid Pack recommends asking “whether certification must be held at bid stage or can be obtained before contract award”. Some bottlenecks vanish once you find out they are only needed if you win.
3. Send every request at once, the same day. Not in the order you found them, and not when you reach that section of the response.
4. Give each request an owner and a chase date. A request nobody is tracking is a request nobody is chasing.
5. Then write. The writing fills the time you would otherwise have spent waiting.

This is ordinary project planning: start the longest wait first. What makes it hard in tendering is that the waiting is scattered across a dozen documents, and the long chains are often found halfway through the pack, after the writing has already begun.

Make each request specific#

A vague request goes to the bottom of somebody's inbox. A specific one can be dealt with in a single sitting.

The same principle applies to referees, accountants and partners. Say exactly what you need, what it is for, the form it should take, and the date you need it by. Leave a margin before the real deadline.

Keep the recurring items up to date#

Most bottlenecks recur. The same insurance letters, accounts, certificates, references and policies come up tender after tender.

So the best time to deal with them is between tenders: keep certificates and accreditations current, put renewal dates in a calendar, keep your platform record up to date, and maintain a set of reusable evidence. The Bid Pack recommends exactly that: “A simple bid library can also save time.”

None of these bottlenecks is clever. Every one is obvious in hindsight. The tenders that miss deadlines rarely do so because the writing was too hard. More often, someone remembered on day twelve something they could have asked for on day one.