Every construction project begins with a bid, and in the background there lies a complex web of construction tendering process. The estimation and bidding process acts as the core of construction and determines how competitive your offer is, and decides whether your project will ultimately succeed or spiral out of control.
Yet, for many companies this phase of construction is still an extremely tiring process. Disconnected teams, scattered documents and working manually on spreadsheets are some of the factors that hardens the tender process. Working on tenders manually or without the assistance of an automated system has a high risk of massive cost overruns in the later stages of the project. That’s why construction companies turn to smart digital solutions to elevate their entire tendering journey.
When talking about automated systems, companies often struggle in choosing the software that will serve the purpose.
Tactive Construction ERP: Transforming the tendering for construction projects
Being a platform built to simplify, connect and elevate the entire tendering process, Tactive integrates every step of the process into a single intelligent system, empowering construction businesses to bid confidently and execute flawlessly and quickly.
Let’s uncover the major and unique challenges in tendering process and check out the smart way in which Tactive resolves them.
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Lead Management
Managing the business lead pipeline is always a complex task for the business development team. And when it comes to handling multiple enquiries across sectors and regions, the process can get chaotic. Managing them though spreadsheets runs into chances of missing valuable data analytics.
Tactive helps with categorizing enquiries in an organised manner, based on sector and region, giving you a comprehensive view of the leads. The level of clarity offered by the Tactive system, helps to identify strong and weak leads, enabling teams to focus on result oriented efforts. Tactive ERP also offers instant insights into enquiry history, helping the sales team to prioritise high-potential leads.
Site Investigation
A crucial step in any construction project is understanding the site conditions and checking the available resources in the locality. The foremost task is recording all key aspects of the site. This is one critical step, which most companies struggle with and most ERPs miss out. It’s the detailed site investigation process. This includes recording on-the-ground factors like resource availability, basic amenities, water and power availability, local labour and transportation conditions and more. These local aspects influence cost and schedule. Gathering, storing and retrieving these data is not perfected in generic systems and often goes wrong in manual processes.
Tactive simplifies this by enabling the investigation team to record site-specific data and ensures your estimation accommodates the site feasibility. Also storing such site information will help to create a valuable knowledge base for future projects in similar regions or conditions.
Team Collaboration
Connecting teams and enabling them to work in perfect sync is always a success factor in tender preparation. However, companies often struggle in establishing interdepartmental coordination. Delay in quote submission from any one team can derail the entire tender preparation. As in traditional methods, information is stored in silos leading to miscommunication or missed updates.
Tactive presents the system, which enables every team to input their resource requirements into one place. Thus quotations are collated in a central hub, eliminating data silos and ensuring no detail is missed. Through such a process the result is obviously a more efficient, faster and error free tendering for construction projects. Each department will stay in sync and the construction tendering process will progress without hindrance
Also read:
How Tactive is different from other Construction ERP Software
Documentation
Documentation is one such aspect, which requires full-fledged focus. In the traditional process, documentation is a notable challenges in tendering process. Documents like drawings, payment records and version histories are often scattered and get lost in emails or folders. This disorganisation creates bottlenecks and slows down approvals.
 The digital transformation enabled by Tactive links all tender-related documents from the moment a tender document is purchased. From the very beginning the process is linked with the finance section. With such an integration in place, version control and real-time updates on changes, documentation is no longer a bottleneck. With such smart capabilities Tactive makes tendering for construction projects, a seamless process ensuring regulatory compliance, avoiding version mismatches, and making document retrieval instant and hassle free. Thus Tactive overcomes such challenges in tendering process and makes jobs easier during audit or dispute resolutions.
Pricing Strategy
A key challenge while tendering for construction projects is identifying the right pricing. Manually comparing vendor or subcontractor quotes is time consuming and often inconsistent. Much analysis has to be done before making any pricing decisions. Any such decision made without proper benchmarks can lead to underbidding or missing profits margins.
Tactive ERP overcomes this issue with an in-built system that compares quotes and recommends the value options. The system helps to retrieve pricing data from old projects. The values picked up can act as a reliable reference to prepare estimations. Historical pricing data will be helpful for price comparison. Ultimately guesswork is avoided, the construction tendering process can be completed quicker and a smarter pricing strategy is employed.
Rate Analysis
With Tactive in place, rate analysis template can be used to prepare quick quotations for all resources, either group wise or item wise. Also in case of amendments, the rates can be updated in one place and it reflects everywhere, making rate management dynamic and error free. This system quickens the tender preparation. Such capability is not possible when the tender working is done manually on spreadsheet or scattered softwares.
Lost Bid Analysis
In the world of competition, success is guaranteed only with growing knowledge. Similarly, in the construction industry preparing to win a bid evolves only from the lessons learned from the previous bids. In case of a losing bid, knowing why the bid was lost is significant. Traditional methods lack this tracking and rely on fragmented feedback.
Tactive ERP resolves this with one of the unique features in the market. ‘The lost bid analysis’.Â
Tactive allows you to update the status of every tender — awarded, not awarded, renegotiated, or cancelled. When the tender is not awarded, the system has provision to record the competitor pricing and negotiation history, etc, in the form of a questionnaire. This helps your business to refine future bids and increase the winning rates. The insights from lost bid analysis will help in adjusting bidding strategies, whether it means tweaking pricing, enhancing proposals or focusing on more suitable projects. Thus keeping your business thriving.
Negotiation and Revision Tracking
Clarifications and revisions are an integral part of the bidding process. Manual recording of these revisions are prone to the risk of miscommunication and missed updates. Any kind of misalignment in data can cost both time and trust. The tactive system overcomes these challenges in the tendering process by helping you record every customer query, clarification and revision. This keeps your team up-to-date with the latest negotiation status. By the way, the team always has clarity on which is the latest input and is always prepared.
Bank Guarantees & LC Alerts
One of the grey areas in construction is managing bank guarantees. Unclaimed bank guarantees or delayed retrievals is a loss making factor, which could be avoided with a proactive alert system in place. Tactive keeps you informed with automated alerts regarding bank guarantees and Letters of Credit (LCs). Based on the defined terms, Tactive construction estimation software will alert your team regarding the bank guarantee due.
Tactive Enhancing Your Tendering Process
Estimation and tendering for construction projects requires a wholesome package of coordination, clarity and insights at every stage. Tendering is one such process in construction that is time bound and demands absolute perfection. An effective pricing strategy is another aspect not to miss out. Starting from lead management, site investigation, documentation, arriving at pricing strategy to lost bid analysis, several crucial factors add up to the construction tendering process. To overcome all such crucial challenges in tendering process, Tactive brings the entire process under one intelligent platform. With such all-in-one construction ERP in place, companies can win more bids and scale with confidence. Thus for construction businesses looking for an automation solution, to ease and quicken their tendering process, Tactive comes as the first and desired choice.
