Eleven working days to submission, six of them spent reading.
The documents arrive as a bundle: specification of services, price schedule, contract terms and seven annexes. The tender manager reads every requirement one by one, notes each one in his own list and, for every price line, pulls figures from the ERP costing and the customer history from the CRM. Anything the documents cannot answer goes to operations as a query and sits there until someone has time.
168pages of documentsThe bundle comprises the specification of services, the price schedule, the contract and seven annexes.
41price linesEach one needs a value from the costing and an assumption behind it.
7queries to operationsLoading bay times and returns handling cannot be answered from the documents alone.
6 of 11working daysThat much of the deadline goes on reading, sorting and asking questions before the first price is set.
Breaking down the documents alone takes six of the eleven working days; cut that to two and the bid reaches the customer 35% faster.
The 35% faster bid submission is this agent's headline figure. The 168 pages, 41 price lines and eleven-working-day deadline describe a mid-sized contract logistics tender; they are not measured values.