Procurement
Tender clarification request
Take every bidder question through one page, tied to the document and the clause it is about.
Why this survey gets sent
“41 questions came in — by email, over WhatsApp, two of them read out to me in the corridor. Half of them do not say which clause they mean, and all of them have to be answered in one addendum by Thursday.”
A clarification round is not a conversation; it is a document with a deadline. The cost is never the answering — it is the reconstruction: working out which paragraph of which annex a bidder meant, and being able to show afterwards that every bidder got the same reply at the same moment. A page that collects the reference, the document and the clause alongside the question removes the reconstruction entirely.
What is in it
- Tender reference number
- The bidding organisation, and the person asking
- Technical, commercial, contractual or process? (single response)
- Which document — instructions, scope, pricing, contract, drawings
- Clause, section or page number
- The question itself (long answer)
- An extract or a drawing, if it makes the question clearer (attachment)
About 5 min to answer
Tender clarification request
About 5 min
How to write this survey
One question per submission
A bidder who sends six questions in one message makes you answer six times inside one box, and publish a paragraph in which the fourth answer is buried. Say on the page that each submission carries one question, and the request repeats cleanly: the same bidder sends it six times, you answer six rows, and the addendum numbers itself.
One question per row is also what makes the round countable. Six rows show you that four bidders asked about the same clause of the scope of work, and that is the strongest signal a tender ever gives you: a clause four organisations cannot read is a clause that will be priced four different ways, and rewording it today is far cheaper than arguing about it at evaluation.
Make the bidder point at the clause
The clause number is the field that pays for itself. Without it, every question begins with a search: which document, which section, which revision. Ask for the document from a closed list and for the clause as free text — a list because a tender pack holds five or six documents and a bidder should never have to invent a name for one, free text because clause numbering is never the same twice.
Keep that field optional. Some questions really are about the tender as a whole — whether two companies may bid as a consortium, whether the bid security may be a bank guarantee — and demanding a clause number would push a bidder into typing one that is not true, which is worse than an empty field.
Sort the question before a person reads it
Technical questions are answered by the engineer, commercial ones by the buyer, contractual ones by whoever owns the contract. Asking a bidder to pick one of those routes the question for you before anybody has read it, and it costs the bidder two seconds. On a round of forty questions it is the difference between one afternoon of sorting and none.
Do not let the categories overlap. “Technical” and “specifications” are one box wearing two labels, and a bidder who cannot choose picks the first one every time. Four categories with visible edges beat eight with soft ones — and name “submission process” explicitly, because a third of every clarification round is about where the envelope is delivered and whether the pricing schedule has to be stamped.
State the deadline, then hold it
The clarification deadline exists so that every bidder holds the same information for the same number of days before the closing date. Write it on the page in the same words as the instructions to bidders, and say what happens to a late question — filed, not answered — because a date with no consequence beside it reads as a suggestion rather than a condition.
Then close the page on the day. A page that keeps taking questions after the deadline will receive one, and you will either break your own rule or write an explanation of why you did not answer. Scheduling the close is a single setting, and it saves the whole argument.
Every answer reaches every bidder
An answer given to one bidder is an advantage given to one bidder. Collect the questions individually and publish the replies collectively, as a numbered addendum sent to everyone who took the documents — including the bidders who asked nothing at all, who are often the ones about to price the clause wrongly.
Strip the names when you publish. The question is the useful part, and a bidder who sees a competitor asking about the maintenance clause has learned something about that competitor's strategy. Say on the page that questions are published without attribution: it is the one sentence that earns you the honest questions instead of the safe ones.