Packaging and Delivery

It is vital to follow precisely the instructions for submitting and delivering the bid - the deadline for submission, the address where the bid must be sent, the number of copies required and the form in which the bid has to be packaged. This latter point is critical when technical information and price information are to be presented separately: usually the technical and financial proposals have to be submitted in separate sealed envelopes, which are in turn placed within a sealed outer package.

In public sector procurement clients have to apply deadlines scrupulously for reasons of even-handedness. If you fail to meet the deadline, and there are no extenuating circumstances, you cannot reasonably complain if your bid is rejected unread.

The client may specify in detail how bids are to be identified. You may be required to leave envelopes unmarked, to use pre-addressed labels included with the bid documentation or to use identification codes. Failure to mark the bid packaging correctly is likely to invalidate a bid.

Delivering the bid may be a matter of simply handing the copies in to an office in the next street or of flying them out to the other side of the world. In every case the most dependable method is to have either yourself, a member of your organization or someone else committed to the success of your bid (for example, a reliable local associate) take the bid personally to the client's address and obtain an official form of receipt recording the date and time of delivery. If you entrust bids to the mail within the UK, use the Special Delivery service, which guarantees delivery by 12 noon on the next working day. When you need to use an express courier service, make sure you know the range of services they offer and the respective costs; check their estimated delivery times carefully and add a contingency margin.

If a bid has a long-haul overseas destination, plan for delivery two full days ahead of the submission deadline. International express courier services may sometimes fail to meet quoted delivery dates through a lack of urgency on the part of local agents: in the world's largest cities, their agents may have a schedule that takes them only once a week to the district where the client's offices are located. If you have kept in touch with your embassy, you may find that the staff there can help with the delivery of the bid. Should your delivery plans go wrong, it may be possible to retrieve the situation and meet the deadline by e-mailing the text of the bid, if the client accepts this procedure. It is not unusual though for clients explicitly to rule out the submission of bids by fax.