Clearly, tenders are a polarising issue and, because during each tender hundreds of applicants are whittled down to a few, negative views get more of an airing than positive ones.
But advocates of tenders are hitting back. They are trying to persuade printers to be more active, suggesting ways of overcoming the shortcomings of tenders while insisting that the printer has a role in reshaping tenders and educating procurement professionals to make them more effective in the future. Print, they say, needs to help itself to make use of this potentially valuable source of work.
The first way they can do this, according to Simon Edkins, managing director of print consultant network the Print Circle, is to be selective when choosing which to pursue.
"You have to be absolutely ruthless about what you decide to tender for and you have to do it well or don’t bother," he says. "You need to look at a tender and judge whether you have a realistic chance of winning it. If you can’t demonstrate previous experience of working on something similar, it is likely you won’t make it past the pre-qualification questionnaire (PQQ)."
Stage one
The PQQ is stage one of the tender process. It aims to cut the hordes into an elite bunch that will normally go on to estimate prices in stage two before the final supplier or suppliers are selected. It is the PQQ stage that attracts the most grumbles and the length of time it takes to fill in the forms is a major source of irritation.
The common consensus is that to complete a tender properly you need to dedicate yourself to the process for at least a week to assemble the information required and answer all the questions. For larger companies that can afford to take someone aside for a week to work exclusively on the tender, this is less of an issue. But Mick Hart, owner of Thistlegraphics, says that, for SMEs, the time it takes to fill in a tender can be a real problem.
"It is more difficult for small businesses as they have to commit the time, and time is money," he says. "If you are being interrupted to do other things all the time, it is not possible to do a good job and so the chances of you winning the tender are remote."
Edkins argues that it does not have to be this laborious, time-consuming process. He says that with the right preparation and a consistent approach, tenders can become incredibly simple and quick to fill out. He advises collating together accreditations and certificates into a reference folder so you have them to hand when they are requested. He also recommends getting the whole team together to create a library of case studies that demonstrate your ability to undertake certain processes or services, again to make life easier when a new tender comes through the door.
"Another thing you can do," he adds, "is each time you fill in a tender, take your answers and make them generic and store them so that when you next come to apply for a tender, you have answers ready to adapt so you don’t have to start from scratch. That said, never reuse an old tender verbatim; you risk leaving something in that is irrelevant and that will undermine your entire tender."
Critics will no doubt question the reasons for devoting this much time to tenders in the first place. For a relatively small prize, they argue the amount of work is disproportionate and the process should be simpler. But Anthony Rowell, group business development manager at Pureprint Group, says that it should be looked at from a different perspective. He believes the detail required in the tender process is beneficial to both the company and the print industry as a whole.
"The best way of learning about your business is to do a few tenders," he says. "The history of the business, how it fits together, what the unique sales propositions are, what you do well and what you do badly – the tender forces you to assess all these things and bring them together into one document. It is an opportunity to know your own business better, and even if you lose that is still a benefit to you."
Paul Manning, commercial director at Printflow, may well be dubious about the business benefits brought by the questions the tenders tend to ask. He has applied for around 30 tenders with a 10% success rate and, in his experience, the procurement officers consistently fail to grasp the complexities of the print process. He argues that this lack of knowledge means tenders are often completely nonsensical.
"Often you will read the PQQ and you know no one with a grasp of print has written it," says Manning. "You get some mad questions, a lot of it being repetitive, the same question three times for example worded slightly differently. They also boil down what you do to generalisations, they miss all the factors involved in the printed product: how fast is the turnaround, what size are they, what paper are they on, are they recycled, do they need to be delivered, what is the print process – the amount of variants is massive."
Generic questionnaires
Chris Springford, associate consultant for BPIF Business, agrees. He says that the people buying the print are the same people who are buying desks, furniture and toilet rolls and so they try and treat print in the same way. While this is frustrating, he says that printers should be proactive and seize the opportunity to aid the buyer and further their own cause in the process.
"Being helpful by really understanding what the buyer is wanting and communicating the options available is an essential part of the process," he says. "You should not be afraid to pick the phone up and talk to the buyer. If you can identify within the tender a means of saving money on its internal and external printing processes then you may be able to offer a unique selling point."
Manning, however, argues that far from being an opportunity to build relationships with clients, tenders erode the traditionally close link between printer and customer. He says that decisions are made on price only and that most communication is done through online forms or through the print management companies that tend to win a lot of the tenders, particularly in the public sector. The space to assist a customer and add value, he says, has gone and all that is left is a scrap over who can do a job cheapest.
Pureprint’s Rowell concedes that when you get through the PQQ, price is the determining factor as everyone at that point tends to have the same accreditations and certificates. However, he adds that single-supplier tenders still provide an opportunity for relationship building with the client.
"Single-supplier agreements are really good as you get to know the client’s business really well and you can help them cut costs and help them in other ways, like improving environmental performance or getting consistency in brand colours," says Rowell. "If you find the right opportunity that suits your business, then it is really good for the client because you can deliver real value."
And value, when it comes down to it, is the whole point of tenders. Value in terms of revenue, in terms of relationship building and in terms of the benefits the tender process can bring to your knowledge of both your own business and the industry as a whole. The potholes are admittedly numerous, but print has to take a role in helping to fill them rather than sitting back and criticising. Advice is available to cut the application times and the opportunity is there to talk to buyers and educate them.
Of course, even if you do all this, there is no guarantee of winning work, but as Paul Manning says, "Just because you’re not right for one tender, it doesn’t mean that in the future you won’t be a perfect fit for someone else."
TOP TIPS
Tendering
- Start early and be selective Read the tender as soon as it lands on your desk and if it does not fit with your business do not apply
- Preparation is the key Collect all your certificates and accreditations together in advance and build up a library of case studies
- Do it well or don’t bother Answer every question, even if it is only worth two marks, it could be the difference between winning and losing
- Have a designated person for tenders Pick one person within your organisation that will be responsible for tenders as they can then build up the expertise
- Documented evidence is key even if you don’t have an official accreditation, if you can provide evidence that you have the processes required in place, you can still pick up marks
