jim wrote:I'm not sure if it's a businesy-ey or corporate- for us when we want to buy something big we have to have a fair bidding process. It prevents the gov't from creating a good ol' boys network I guess, and just going straight to your favorite vendor. The idea is that you document what you need precisely, and then companies put in bids. You select the winner based on quantitative data, based on replies to the RFP. In other words, the RFP says things like "We need to solve world hunger and you can only use a hammer and a tractor". Company X comes back and says "We can do that for $10 using just a hammer and a tractor", company Y says "We can do that for $15 using just a hammer and a tractor", and company Z says "we can do it for $5 but we have to use a hammer and a horse". Y is eliminated, because clearly X is the best solution. Now there is some wiggle room with X and Z - you could select Z and justify it by saying that the cost savings were so great and the use of a horse is not a big deal, or you could select X because Z wanted to a horse and that just isn't going to work.
I would doubt that real companies have to go through this though, but maybe they do.
Sounds fair except when the RFP is slanted toward their preferred vendor. Bid/no bid decisions are often made by evaluating the requirements to see if they are tailored to allow them to pick who they wanted in the first - esp. In the wonderful world of gov't procurement. Your tax dollars at work.
Yep, that's how it works. A little tweak will get you who you want ... "We need world peace AND blue skies".
