The most expensive misconception in public procurement is that a bid is assessed as a whole. In fact every procedure examines in two separate steps with completely different logic, and a supplier who does not grasp that separation invests effort in the wrong place.
This article explains both stages, their legal separation, and the practical consequences for bid work. The wider context is in the guide to public procurement in Switzerland.
Two stages, two logics
Suitability criteria relate to the company and answer a yes-no question: is this supplier fundamentally capable of performing the contract? What is examined are references for comparable contracts, the qualification of the proposed individuals, financial and technical capability, and compliance with statutory obligations. A firm that does not reach that threshold is out.
Award criteria relate to the bid and answer a comparative question: which of the admitted bids is best? What is scored are typically price, quality, the experience of the specific key personnel proposed, and the solution approach, each with a weighting announced in advance.
The practical consequence is hard: an outstanding bid saves nobody who has not evidenced suitability. The assessment does not take place at all.
Why the separation is prescribed in law
That the same aspects may not be scored twice is not formalism. If company size were counted first as a suitability threshold and then again as an award criterion, larger suppliers would be doubly favoured — although they have already cleared the threshold. The separation therefore protects competition and serves equal treatment.
In practice the line is not always sharp, particularly on the experience of key personnel. The difference lies in the reference point: suitability asks whether the company has qualified staff; award scores the individuals specifically proposed for this contract.
Economically advantageous is not cheap
The award goes to the most economically advantageous bid. That phrase is regularly read as the cheapest bid, and that is wrong. Only where an awarding body weights price at one hundred per cent does the lowest price win automatically — which happens with standardised supplies but is by no means the rule.
On services, design work and complex projects, quality is regularly weighted substantially, sometimes more heavily than price. The revised procurement law has emphasised that orientation further. A supplier who reflexively competes on price is working past the assessment in such procedures.
The weighting carries the real information
The criteria themselves say less than their weighting. A procedure at sixty per cent quality and forty per cent price demands a completely different bid strategy from one with the reverse split. In the first case effort in the qualitative section pays; in the second, sharp costing decides.
That weighting must be announced in advance, sits in the tender documents, and may not be changed afterwards. Reading it is therefore the first step after publication — before costing, before writing, and before deciding whether to bid at all.
Proportionality is reviewable
Suitability criteria must relate objectively to the contract and must not exceed what performing it requires. References at a scale far above the contract tendered restrict competition unnecessarily and may be challengeable.
For suppliers that means: criteria that look unreachable need not simply be accepted. The question whether a requirement is proportionate to the contract is worth asking — and can be raised in the question round before it becomes a ground of exclusion.
What this means for bid work
A clear order follows from the two stages. First read the scoring matrix, to know where effort pays. Then hold the suitability criteria against your own body of evidence. If there is a gap there, that is the answer — before any costing and before any writing.
That order sounds obvious and is nonetheless routinely reversed. The result is bids into which several person-days have flowed and which fail at the first stage on a missing piece of evidence.
The profile question
Across several procedures, the weighting becomes strategic information. A company with strong references and experienced key personnel should seek quality-weighted procedures. A company with cost advantages on standardised services should seek the price-weighted ones. That matching acts more powerfully in economic terms than any improvement to an individual bid.
A firm that documents its own outcomes recognises this pattern after a few procedures. One that does not keeps bidding everywhere and wonders at a hit rate that will not move. How to structure the body of evidence for this is shown in the solution pages for Submira for SMEs without a bid team and, for quality-weighted procedures, Submira for engineering firms.