4 Keys In Deciding Whether To Tender For Construction Projects

Last Updated: Jun 28, 2022

Planning for a construction project is a formidable task which involves a huge investment with multiple stakeholders such as clients, consultants, and contractors. A tender is a submission of a technical, administrative, and contractual material made by a potential contractor in response to an invitation to tender by the project client.

Established contractors normally realise the importance of doing initial research before committing themselves to enter the tender. Normally, tender pre-qualification is a strict process. A low-quality tender submitted due to problems such as insufficient time and incomplete tender documents normally lead to tender rejection by the client.

Thus, this article is seeking to help contactor know if they should or should not submit a tender at the initial tendering decision phase.

1. Project Characteristic

Supplier should have a clear overview of the projects that they are getting themselves into, before anything else. The first thing to look at is of course the size of the project. The size of project will decide the timeline, capital and manpower needed to get the contact fulfilled. Project difficulties is often but not always tied to size of the project, there may be also small construction projects that have high level of difficulties, where subcontractor & supplier should definitely put that into consideration. The location and site condition should also be one of the factor that influences your decision in going into the project.

We highly recommend meeting and communicating with the Main contractor or developer team to have an in-depth understanding of the projects goals and timeline, and any special requirement should be made known before a tender was submitted. Intender.my can help you have a brief detail and lead you to key person with the key information of relevant projects.

2. Business Benefit

It always goes both way when it comes to construction projects and we want to close the deal with an win-win situation in mind. Consider the company reputation in stake for both parties whereby the industry will take in in future undertakings. Prior to that, do have a field research on the company reputation in the market as it can be a big tell tail sign of the character of the company that you are dealing with. Besides the fancy “track record “ or “project portfolio” being displayed as trophies on their corporate website, word of mouth and market reputation is equally if not more important deal breaker before deciding to work with the said company.

After that, business continuity is also important, are we looking at an one-off project or an on-going working relationship for a long term basis? What are the other on going jobs or even business plans that the current company is having on hand ? is the company able to walk the miles with you ? as it may affect the pricing of the projects by taking relationship building into account.

3. Tendering Capabilities

It is still a common practice for construction industry players to manage documents by hand although some subcontract it to printing or photocopying companies. Documents are still transferred by printing them out and sending them by mail or couriers to the other parties functioning as intermediaries. Taking on a projects can be daunting as the whole process from start to finish can be complex and involves many parties. Before you dive into one, it is important to do a self-evaluation and see if you are able to meet the requirement and criteria set by the potential clients. The key ones are technical capabilities of the project, it is important to evaluate if your team have necessarily experience and expertise in completing difficult part of the projects, it can be going into a deep sea for a piling or going high up in the sky for a scaffolding job, the technical know-hows will decide your success or failure in the projects.

People capability is everything, a construction projects is mainly reliant on a lot of manpower and failure to meet the requirement can sink the whole ship. Consider it with the timeline given to complete a particular projects.

Tendering and procedural capabilities often overlooked especially tendering for construction projects in Malaysia. The process is usually more complex than anyone can imagine as it involves a lot of paper work and specification, do find out if you are able to meet the tendering requirement set by a certain customers as every customers differs and some may have higher requirements than others. Intender.my is one of the company that uses online platform to facilitate and streamline complex tendering process.

4. Bidding Process

Think you’ve checked out all the list and ready for tendering for a construction projects ? The bidding process itself is a big piece of the puzzle as projects vendors and subcontractors navigate them self through winning a projects. After tender is submitted with tender document price, the subcontractor will be called upon for project tender. They will skim through the profile and capabilities of the subcontractor by looking at their previous projects portfolios or experience with similar projects, it depends a lot of judgement of the decision maker. The completeness of documentation will also portray the level of seriousness and commitment of the vendor/ subcontractor to getting the projects.

The traditional practice of submitting tender through hardcopies in Malaysia are slowing fading out as papers are becoming obsolete. Currently industry are pivoting into a more sophisticated process where documents are being transferred and stored digitally through cloud because nobody is finding documents on the shelves in the office again. E-applications are highly in demand to deal with the wide range of tasks involved in construction management. It involved all sorts of managerial roles, forms used in the system, varying degree of methods and tools of management. Tools are required to store and process extremely large amounts of information that accumulate over time, and as a result, various types of software for construction management have been developed and made available, Intender.my is one of the provider of Online construction projects tendering system, made for construction projects and construction professional in Malaysia.