Bids for public buyers rarely fail on weak wording. They fail on incompleteness, on expired evidence, and on deadlines that were not the bid deadline. All three errors share one cause: the wrong order of work.
This article describes the order that prevents them, and separates two kinds of work that in practice are usually mixed. The wider context is in the guide to public procurement in Switzerland.
Reconstruction and substance
A bid consists of two very different parts. The first is reconstruction: digging out references, matching evidence, finding earlier wording, checking formalities, filling in forms. The second is the substantive core: the actual solution, its justification, the costing.
For most suppliers the first part takes the larger share of time, although it requires no professional judgement. The second is what a company is paid for. Working both in parallel under time pressure means losing on the substance — and making the formal errors.
Step one: the scoring matrix, not the specification
The first look belongs not to the description of the service but to the scoring matrix. It says whether price or quality decides, and thereby determines where the work belongs. Only afterwards is it worth opening the specification.
That order matters because it also enables abandonment. A procedure whose weighting does not fit your profile can be discarded after ten minutes — rather than after two days.
Step two: suitability against your own evidence
Before any substantive work, establish whether suitability can be evidenced at all. Which references does the tender require, at what scale, from what period? Which evidence must be supplied, and which of it sits with third parties?
If there is a gap here, that is the answer. Discarding a procedure at this point is considerably cheaper than after costing. And if the gap can be closed, procurement of the evidence starts now rather than in the final week.
Step three: build the requirements list
From the documents, extract a complete list of what must be submitted: forms, evidence, declarations, format requirements, signatures, deadlines. Every item with a reference to where it was found, so it stays checkable.
That list is the single most effective instrument against the most common ground of exclusion. Incompleteness does not arise from ignorance but from nobody remembering at the end of the deadline what was required. Build the list on day one and on the last day you only tick it off.
Step four: work evidence lead time backwards
Third-party evidence takes time. Social insurance confirmations, subcontractor evidence, bank references, certificate copies — none of it is in-house and none arrives on request. Work the deadline backwards: anything to be obtained externally is requested in the first week.
For general and design-build contractors this is the real bottleneck, because evidence must be supplied for every named subcontractor and carries validity dates. How to structure that is described in Submira for general contractors.
Step five: use the question round
Unclear items in the bill of quantities, contradictions between documents and ambiguous suitability requirements belong in the question round. Answers go to all suppliers, which means a good question also helps competitors. It is nevertheless almost always right: a clarified item is costed correctly, an unclarified one is carried as risk across the whole contract term.
The precondition is finding the ambiguities early. The deadline for questions sits well before the bid deadline and is routinely missed — not from carelessness but because the documents were worked through late.
Step six: only now write and cost
Once scoring logic, suitability, requirements list, evidence procurement and open questions are settled, the actual bid work begins — and it begins more calmly, because the uncertainties are gone. The qualitative section comes from existing material: earlier bids, reference projects, approach descriptions. What gets newly written is what is specific to this contract.
At the end stands the formal check against the requirements list from step three. It takes an hour and prevents the error that would devalue the preceding days.
Why the order is the whole point
None of these steps is laborious. Together they cost barely more time than the usual approach — they only distribute the effort differently. The difference is that decisions fall early, external procurement starts early, and what stands at the end is review rather than production. That is exactly why suppliers working systematically hold a structural advantage in this market.