Two stage tendering with a twist

Here’s a variation on a theme for two stage tenders………..

How many have you been used to the traditional way of two stage tendering, simply price the prelims and give a percentage for profit and overheads.

Well maybe no more.

How many of you have seen this, or variations on this of late? Two stage tender, first stage is for the usual priced aspects of prelims, overheads and the like but now here’s the twist….

A large element of the project is to be priced and fixed at the first stage.

Other elements are to be budget costs, although in reality a design does exist and is provided with the tender documents.

I’ve seen this twice in the last month having never seen this before.

What do you think to this, a good way forward?

Is this the start of clients being able to avoid getting the run around after months of negotiations with a contractor only to find their budget has been blown?

Or is it something Contractors will shun viewing it as a risk not worth entertaining in the current economic climate for them?

Oh and by the way it’s a design and build project too, but you guessed that anyway.

I’m back

Well it’s been a long while but I’m ready to start to write again, apologies for the delay. It feels like I’ve had a long period of writers block!

What’s happened since I was away?

Well I joined the corporate world to work at Driver Project Services and what a great experience that was. There are some good people at Driver and I wish them every success for the future. The thing is the corporate world just isn’t for me.

So here I am on my own starting out again and wondering what to write about, and my minds gone blank, or vacant, or just rusty…………however some things never change do they? Or is it just me getting old……..probably, I hear you say.

But here are the themes I’ve heard from some of the senior people that I’ve met in the recent years:

1. Why don’t they teach measurement anymore?
2. Why don’t they teach measurement?
3. Why?

Then theres…….

1. Why aren’t there any good qs’s anymore
2. Why aren’t there any good qs’s
3. Why?

Followed by……..

1. Why do we rush to start things half baked?
2. Why do we rush?
3. Why?

Lots of Why’s and not much action by anyone to do too much about it I hear you say. True. And we are guilty of that.

So what to do?

I don’t have the magic answer it’s been a series of small incremental changes to get to where we are now. Is it for the best? Us old folks don’t think so much. But younger folks think what’s all the fuss about, move with the times, use the technology, be brave, be adventurous, be collaborative, embrace technology and……………….be BIM

Better stop there, don’t get me talking yet about BIM and what I’ve seen and heard of what’s happening in the real world with this………I’ll save that for later!

Bye for now, more another week……………………….

Standards of Tender Information

Now I’m not intending to have a go at designers or Architects here as they have a tough enough job as it is, but working closely with contracting organisations across the country we do see an awful lot of work provided by design teams and the standard we see…………..

We love the advent of electronic communication but please, please, please think about the stuff you are churning out these days. It’s all so easy to burn loads of standard stuff on a CD – oh just in case they might need this or that drawing or document, or to stuff it onto a server and say here’s the password and log in details, away you go sort out what you need!

We spend more time in our office trying to fathom out what on earth has been sent through on a job sometimes now than actually doing the job. And that is saying something! And I know that contractors and subcontractors feel the same way about it too. It’s frequent topic of conversation.

And drawings…….we have to check every time now to see that a drawing is to an actual scale you can recognise! The number of times recently we’ve had drawings that are not to scale……ok might be only between 5 and 10% error but that could make or break a tender submission.

Have to say that the best sets of documents we have seen recently come out on civil engineering projects. There’s always a list of numbered documents, you know exactly the drawings that have been issued (as you always get a drawing register) and everything is just……well……numbered logically so you can follow things. A joy to work with.

So why can we not have some uniformity in standard of documents that are issued by the design teams at tender stage? It seems everyone just does their own thing and dumps it further down the supply chain to sort out. Just saying that’s all……..