The Public Bids / Competitor Tracking window is an invaluable tool that ensures no bids slip through the cracks due to oversight. It offers more than just monitoring bid due dates and awards; it provides essential insights into your competitive landscape. This window not only tracks how frequently your company competes with others for business but also allows you to compare your pricing against individual competitors over time, especially when collecting public bid prices published post-award. Even for projects that aren't formal bids, logging information about your competitors and project outcomes helps create a comprehensive history of your company's wins and losses over time.
Accessing the Public Bids window is straightforward. You can right-click on a project from any grid or tree listing projects, then navigate to the Modules submenu and select "Public Bids." Alternatively, within the Project Information window, click on the "Modules" section in the left "hamburger" menu panel and choose "Public Bids / Competitor Tracking." This flexibility ensures a seamless integration of this valuable tool into your workflow.
Whether you're handling a formal bid or simply tracking your competition, completing the following information is crucial. Even in cases where there isn't a specific Bid Due Date, providing this information, including any available project specifications, is essential. The project type plays a pivotal role as e-manage|ONE uses it for fair comparisons. Only product types from other projects that match your project's type will be compiled for analysis.
Please refrain from filling out the "Bid Submitted" field unless you are dealing with an actual bid and have officially submitted it. Your bid amount should only be recorded as the final bid amount after the bid submission process. This practice ensures your data accurately reflects your bid history and aligns with your project management requirements.
Filling out this portion of the form will put the project on the Bid / Competitor Tracking on the Today pop-out panel from the right side of the e-manage|ONE main window. See here for additional details.
After you have created the initial Bid information, next you will want to add your competitors. If this is a bid, you can add competitors when you first know which companies you are competing with, then after the bid is awarded, fill out the Bid Amount for each competitor and if one of your competitors has the winning bid, check the Winning bid checkbox for the competitor. If not a bid, simply choose the competitor and save, and after you know who won the project, check the winning bid on either the left side of the window (you won) or the winning bid for the competitor on the right side (they won).
Whether or not you are working on an actual bid or just tracking your competition you must fill out the awarded date and check the Winning bid checkbox on either your side or click on a competitor that won the project and click the winning bid on their side. With public bids, the bid amounts are published data regardless of who won. This is a great way to get to know your competition in a way that you cannot keep in your head.
You can change the Compile Info drop down list box to view data from different periods of time to see if you are getting closer to your competition (or winning more projects against them) over time.
You can also track this information directly in the Current Opportunities grid in the Today Panel to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Most fields can even be made editable to adjust information directly in the grid.
