To increase the probability of winning a bid, the key is to look at a few points: Compared with ordinary procurement, bidding is a highly organized, normative, institutional and professional activity, so it has a complete set of rules. If bidders want to stand out in the competition, they must understand the difference between bidding and procurement and ordinary procurement, master the rules and characteristics of bidding and procurement, and pay special attention to avoid those man-made mistakes that may lead to the cancellation of bids, so as to avoid the mistakes made by many people for bidding. All efforts were in vain. At present, except for international tenders that must disclose the reasons for failure to win the bid, there is no mandatory requirement for other forms of tendering to disclose the reasons for failure to win the bid to the bidders.

Qualifications of Bidders

Bidders are legal persons or other organizations that respond to the bidding and participate in the bidding competition. In practice, we often encounter companies bidding in the name of their branches or subsidiaries that are in charge of business in different regions. It should be pointed out that, legally speaking, a branch does not have legal personality and is not an independent legal entity, so bidding in the name of a branch is invalid. When selecting subordinate subsidiaries to bid, bidders must follow the principle that "two or more legal persons whose legal representatives are the same person, parent companies, wholly-owned subsidiaries and their holding companies are not allowed to bid for the same goods at the same time." According to the provisions of the bidding document, you must carefully select the appropriate bidding entity. In particular, you must pay attention to the fact that the selected subsidiary should fully meet the qualification requirements of the bidder in the bidding documents. If the subsidiary cannot meet the corresponding qualification requirements, it should consider participating in the bidding competition in the name of the stronger parent company.

Supplier Bidding

Normally, if a supplier participates in the bidding, the supplier should obtain a letter of authorization signed by the manufacturer. The number of times a manufacturer can participate in the same project is stipulated in the 2004 Ministry of Commerce Order No. 13 "Implementation Measures for International Bidding for Mechanical and Electrical Products" (hereinafter referred to as Order No. 13): "The bidding products of two or more bidders are If produced by the same manufacturer or integrator, it will be calculated as one bidder; if two or more integrators use the same manufacturer's products as part of their integrated products, they will be calculated as different integrators." Order No. 27 stipulates that for goods of the same brand and model from the same manufacturer, only one agent can be entrusted to participate in the bidding, otherwise the bid shall be invalidated. Therefore, bidders must be treated differently based on the actual situation of the project and the specific requirements of the bidding documents.

Consortium bidding

In large or complex projects, contractors are often required to have qualifications, performance and capabilities in design, supply, construction, installation, etc. Some projects even Bidders are required to have the ability to raise funds, so bidders usually need to form a consortium to bid. When bidding in the form of a consortium, it should be noted that the tenderer often has strict regulations on the consortium, such as requiring the members of the consortium to bear common and respective responsibilities, which is what we usually call joint and several liability. At the same time, the members of the consortium should clearly identify the leader. The scope of work undertaken by him or her should be the main part of the project or the workload should account for the vast majority. The leader should bear the main responsibility for contacting the bidder and organizing the work, including collecting payment, and The first liability is to the owner in the event of breach of contract or loss. In addition, the law also stipulates that if members of a consortium form a consortium with the same professional qualifications and undertake the same work, the qualifications of the consortium in this regard shall be based on the unit with lower qualifications.

Signing and sealing of bid documents

Since bid evaluation is often based on written information, it is very important whether the bid documents are binding on the bidder. The so-called binding force refers to whether the bidding document is signed by the legal representative or his authorized representative and is validly stamped with the official seal of the bidder. Usually the bidding documents will stipulate which documents need to be signed and which need to be stamped. In practice, we often encounter situations where bidders only use official seals or signatures. Whether this is correct or not depends entirely on the provisions of the bidding documents. Therefore, bidders must sign and seal in strict accordance with the provisions of the bidding documents. At the same time, if the person who signs the bidding document is not the legal representative, the bidding document must provide a letter of authorization signed by the legal representative, so that the bidding document signed by the authorized person will be binding on the bidder. In a consortium bidding, specific personnel authorized by each party to the consortium should sign the bidding documents. If the bidding documents clearly require that the bidding documents be signed by all parties in the consortium, all members of the consortium should also entrust their respective representatives to sign the bidding documents simultaneously.

Regarding the legal representative signing the power of attorney, we have also encountered this special case in practice: some large multinational companies have several people with signing authority, and the power of attorney is issued by one of them. In this case, the power of attorney The signer is not necessarily the legal representative. In order to prove that the signature is binding, the bidder should submit relevant certificates to prove that the authorizer has the authority to authorize.

In addition, when it comes to authorization, another issue that should be noted is that the authorized person cannot sub-delegate, because according to the "General Principles of Civil Law", sub-delegation must be confirmed by the original client. Before that, The validity of the authorization should be understood to be pending.

Submission of bid documents

The submitter of bid documents shall be the legal representative of the bidder.

In some tenders, in order to prevent bidders from borrowing their qualifications and maintain the seriousness of the bid, the person submitting the bid document is required to produce relevant certificates when submitting the bid document. For example, in the bidding of a rail transit system project, the bidding documents require: "When the bidder's legal representative or his authorized representative comes to submit the bidding documents, he must bring and present the following supporting documents (copies are invalid): Legal representative Certificate of qualification; letter of authorization of the legal representative (if the legal representative comes in person, there is no need to provide the authorization letter); ID card of the bidder's legal representative or his authorized representative. If the supporting documents presented by the bidder are incomplete. , the bidding documents submitted by it will not be accepted." The supporting documents produced by a large multinational group were all photocopies, and were rejected by the relevant bidding authorities. Later, it was learned that the group had been following the project for two or three years. , foreign experts went back and forth many times to gain an in-depth understanding of the characteristics of the project, and re-optimized the design of the bidding project, which cost millions of yuan. However, due to such an oversight, the bidding documents did not even have a chance to be displayed. The wish of the relevant scientific and technological personnel to contribute to the project and create a reputation for the company was also in vain, and the tenderer was also very likely to lose a reward. Opportunities for excellent proposals and excellent winning bidders.

Performance

Since the projects invited for bidding are often of a certain scale, it is difficult to imagine that the tenderer will award the project to a unit without similar performance to complete. For this reason, bidders often explicitly require bidders to provide proof of performance in completing similar projects in the bidding documents. It is worth noting that the performance used by some units may belong to their affiliated units, or their roles in similar projects may be very different from the bidding requirements. It should be said that the performance of related units should not be understood as the performance of the bidder, and whether performance that is significantly different from the bidding requirements is accepted must be decided by the tenderer or bid evaluation expert.

Preparation and format of bidding documents

Bidding documents often specify the sealing and marking of bidding documents, the number of originals and copies of bidding documents, and the production of revised copies. Regulation. Some bidding documents may also have special requirements for bid documents, such as the length, font and size of the bid document, the format and markings of the drawings, the name or mark of the bidder cannot appear in the hidden bid, and the technical bid in the two-stage bid evaluation shall not appear. There must be no commercial bid content, etc... These regulations are diverse, and some regulations are often clearly stated in the bidding documents as invalid bids. If the bidder is not careful, he may face the fate of being eliminated early.

Bid guarantee

The establishment of the bid guarantee is to ensure the seriousness of the bidding work and to protect the bidder from the bidder withdrawing the bid within the bid validity period, not signing the contract or not signing the bid after winning the bid. Loss caused to relevant parties due to issuance of a performance guarantee, or failure to pay relevant bidding agency fees. Bid security is a means to economically restrict the behavior of bidders. Because, when the bidder defaults, especially when the bidder defaults after winning the bid, the tenderer will have to re-select the winning bidder. Sometimes, the tenderer even has to re-tender to select the winning bidder again. In this way, the tenderer will have to re-invest manpower, material and financial resources, and may also have to face the reality of project delay. After the bid deposit is established, the losses caused by the bidder's fault to the bidder can be compensated at a minimum by forfeiting the deposit, which is conducive to protecting the interests of the bidder. Therefore, the bid deposit is a necessary link in the bidding process. Common mistakes made by bidders in this regard are forgetting the bid security deposit, or the amount of the bid security deposit is insufficient, or the bid guarantee issued by the bidder is in a format that cannot be accepted by the tenderer, or the validity period of the bid is regarded as the validity period of the bid guarantee, resulting in The bid bond is invalid. The consequences of the above situations are of course the cancellation of the bid.

Technical Bidding Documents

If commercial bidding documents mainly reflect the bidder’s qualifications, qualifications, performance and quotation, then technical bidding documents are the bidder’s understanding of the bidding content. A specific technical response, which tells the tenderer what configuration, what kind of technology, what kind of guarantee measures, etc., the bidder will complete the project with quality and quantity. Simply copying the technical content of the tenderer or generally stating that there is no objection will usually Treated as a waste mark. In an international tender for emergency generators, we learned that a company had considerable strength, but during the bid evaluation, no technical documents could be found despite searching. I called the person in charge and the answer was: We do not provide technical documents because we can all comply with your requirements. Members of the bid evaluation committee were dumbfounded, and one can imagine the result.

Some key indicators will also be set in some bidding documents. If the key indicators are not met, the bid will be discarded. Some bidders questioned key indicators after failing to win the bid, believing that the tenderer was biased. The author believes that it is reasonable for the tenderer to have its own clear requirements, but the requirements should be able to ensure sufficient competition.

About corporate integrity issues

In tendering and bidding, integrity is also a very serious issue. In order to win the bid, some bidders often inflate their technical parameters, or make fictitious performance, or make promises that they cannot fulfill. Sometimes the tenderer clearly knows that the bidder has made a false bid, but has no basis to cancel the bid.

Such an approach may allow the bidder to win the bid once, but the damage to the company's reputation will be permanent, so it is something that a far-sighted company should avoid. It is worth noting that this situation is gradually changing, for example, through the bid evaluation committee to clarify and require bidders to provide conclusive evidence, or to add relevant clauses to the bidding documents to restrict bidders' false bidding behavior, and stipulate that if the bidder is found False bidding behavior may disqualify the bidder even if the contract is being executed.

Listed above are some situations that bidders may easily overlook. In addition, although all tenders are subject to the "Tendering and Bidding Law", each type of tendering, such as survey, design, construction, supervision, equipment, material bidding, etc., depends on its nature, and the applicable methods are also based on its characteristics. Correspondingly, regulatory agencies are also different, and their interpretations of abandoned bids are also different. For example, Order No. 13 stipulates that the bidding documents do not meet the main parameter requirements marked with an asterisk (*) in the technical specifications of the bidding documents or are not supported by technical data, and the general parameters in the technical specifications of the bidding documents exceed the maximum range or the highest number of items that are allowed to deviate. , Any response in the technical specifications of the bidding document that is inconsistent with the facts or a false bid will be treated as a discarded bid. Order No. 27 stipulates that if a bidder submits two or more bid documents with different contents, or submits two or more bids for the same bidding goods in one bid document without declaring which one is the final bid, the bidder shall If the name or organizational structure is inconsistent with the pre-qualification and no valid proof is provided, or the consortium bid is not accompanied by the bidding agreement agreed by all parties to the consortium, it will be treated as a discarded bid. Order No. 12 of the "Interim Provisions on the Bid Evaluation Committee and Bid Evaluation Methods" jointly issued by the State Planning Commission and seven other ministries and commissions clearly stipulates that the completion period of the bidding project stated in the bidding document exceeds the period specified in the bidding document and obviously does not meet the technical specifications and technical standards. The requirements, packaging methods, inspection standards and methods stated in the bidding documents do not meet the requirements of the bidding documents, and the bidding documents are accompanied by conditions that are unacceptable to the bidder, etc. This is a non-substantial response to the bidding documents, which is a waste of bids. It should be noted that Order No. 12 has very strict technical requirements for bidders, and the meaning of “attached to conditions unacceptable to the bidder, etc.” is very broad.

In short, as a qualified bidder, you should pay attention to the accumulation of relevant laws and regulations. Secondly, after getting the bidding documents, read them carefully, pay attention to the laws applicable to the bidding documents, sort out the conditions for invalidating the bids, and consult the bidder or bidding agent if you encounter any unclear points, so as to prepare a qualified bid. The bidding documents are actually not difficult. I hope that these experience summaries of the author can be helpful to the majority of bidders in their future bidding work. I hope that more manufacturers can master bidding skills and further broaden their business sources.