Integrating sub-contractors Tender answers

Once you have sent the ITT file to potential sub-contractors you should receive Tender files from them in return. You will need to make a selection of which company and which version of the tender for a given company you want to take into account into your proposal. 

This process is called Integration.

Becoming fluent in issuing ITTs and integrating Tenders will allow you to take full benefit of the ECOS features and will support you in efficiently and rigorously managing your sub-contractors.

The tender integration process is intended for situations where you have identified potential sub-contractors during the bidding phase and have received a tender file from them.

It is possible to take budgetary provisions for sub-contracted parts that have not been included yet in the Invitation to Tender. This is for instance the case for so-called “Best practices”  corresponding to products and services for which Invitation to Tender will be issued once the prime contractor will get the Phase B2 contract awarded. It is possible to define ITTs on the same anchoring node as the budgetary provisions so it will be easy at a later stage to replace the budgetary provisions with the selected sub-contractor’s tenders. This allows you to prepare the Ceiling price conversion into fixed price for Phase C/D with minimal effort.

The Tender file is generally a static image of your sub-contractor’s proposal. Such file is normally not editable but during the process of negotiation with your sub-contractors it is of course possible to ask them to produce an updated tender file.

However, the restricted time before the proposal submission deadline may prove to be insufficient to run this normal process.

The upper-tier contractor therefore has the possibility to make global price changes on specific WPs of the sub-contractor’s tender file. This will allow the upper-tier to present a price that is in line with its expectations. These global changes (normally prices reductions) will however leave some traces in the various reports and may signal unsettled negotiations to the evaluators so it is recommended to use it only if an updated tender file could not be obtained in time. Carrying out such global price changes is only possible on the part of the price of the direct sub-contractor. It cannot be done on work packages of lower-level sub-contractors.