If you didn’t get the price you were planning from your bid solicitation, you might be thinking;

• Why weren’t the bid prices what the designer projected?
• Was the design prepared to meet the budget, or was the cost just left to chance?
• Whose fault was this?
• Does anybody know what this should really cost?

A common reaction to high bid prices is often to blame someone, then re-bid the project.  It might be a good idea to seek additional bids, but unless it’s required by law because public funds are used for the project, re-bidding might not be the best option.  Whether a re-bid is either required by law or simply desirable, doing so without something changing from the original bid solicitation can be an exercise in futility, and potentially disastrous if the new bids are even more expensive.

A knee-jerk reaction to high bid prices is to redesign the project to either make it smaller, or to use lesser quality materials (sometimes called, in a misguided way, ‘value engineering’).  Without an effective plan for the bid solicitation, there is a good chance that re-bidding a lesser quality, or smaller, project could cost as much as the initial bids.  Most of the time, the result is just an overpriced project of smaller size.

But what if there is a better alternative?

Perhaps it would be better to structure a second bid solicitation in a more deliberate, more effective manner, rather than simply relying on what is presumed to be a competitive market and leaving the entire matter to chance again. Perhaps what you should be thinking is;

• Was the bidder list too short?  Too long?
• Were the right bidders submitting proposals?
• Were the real needs of the project clearly defined?
• Was there any ambiguity about the project’s intent?
• Does the design match the budget?
• Should the project be re-bid at all, or are there more effective alternatives to getting the best contract?

Can anybody help?

Don’t leave the matter to chance.  McKenzie-Douglass can help.