Customer story
Winning a $10M job without the lowest price
How the fit-out division of a national contractor turned its tender period into a demonstration of competence the client could see.
- job won against a field with cheaper bids
- $10M
- of the tender period: full set reviewed, gaps and clashes cited to their sheets
- Day one
- strategic RFIs, value management options, senior time with the client
- Won on professionalism
job won against a field with cheaper bids
of the tender period: full set reviewed, gaps and clashes cited to their sheets
strategic RFIs, value management options, senior time with the client
The fit-out division of a national contractor ran a $10M tender through CIM from the start of the tender period. The gaps and ambiguities that usually surface in the final week surfaced in the first pass, cited to their sheets, and the team converted the best of them into RFIs during the tender period. The hours the platform gave back went into value management options and senior time with the client. When prices landed, theirs wasn't the sharpest. They won anyway.
“The gaps came back cited on day one, and the hours we saved went into value management and time with the client. By the time prices landed, they knew who understood their job.”
The challenge
On a competitive tender, every bidder prices from the same imperfect documents, and most of the tender period disappears into reading them. The bids that lose on price usually also lose on presence: no time left for value management, no senior hours left for the client, and RFIs that ask what the documents already answer.
The solution
The team ran the full set through CIM at the start of the tender period. Discrepancies, gaps and ambiguities came back cited to their sheets in the first pass. The estimators turned the material ones into RFIs. An RFI that pinpoints a real problem in the documents does two jobs at once: it protects the price, and it shows the client's team this bidder has read their documents more closely than anyone else pricing them.
The results
They won the job. The client had cheaper bids in front of them and picked the team that understood the project best. The mechanism was visible all the way through the tender period: sharper questions earlier, value management options the client could weigh, and senior people spending their hours across the table instead of behind a pile of drawings. Price got them into the field. The tender period, used differently, got them the job.
Modules used
- Assistant
- Drawing comparison
- Report compliance audits
- Registers