Contractor Bidding

Contractor Bidding Explained from a Consultant’s View

Wherever you are on the wide spectrum of stakeholders involved in a building construction project, each entity needs to perform a specific role and collaborate effectively for the project's completion. On the client or owner's perspective, expediting the construction project can lead to faster handover—leading to higher value propositions and business profitability.

For professionals such as architects, construction managers and contractors working on the nitty-gritty of the building projects, each industry specialist knows that contractor bidding arrives at a crucial point where it can make or break the success of the client's project. Enter Nearby EngineersNew York Engineers, where we offer professional engineering service on contractor bidding sans bias.

From a client's perspective, here's how it will work for you based on your exposure in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry:

Act as the sole decision-maker when previously experienced on the design, procurement and construction of industry-specific complex projects
Hire the expertise of industry professionals such as engineering consultants and construction managers to work on your behalf as a representative

Building projects can range from any type, scale, location, occupancy, and contextual requirements. Residential projects such as condominiums with typical space allocations do not require much complexity, as opposed from large-scale healthcare projects where specialized consultants of different disciplines work together to form a coherent whole. Case in point, stack up complex hospitals against simple bungalows, and see the wide discrepancies on design requirements alone.

Where complex design is present, competitive contractors should deliver. However, competence should be evaluated two-way for effective building fruition.

Here's how Nearby EngineersNew York Engineers offer you dual functionality as an expert engineering consulting partner:

Evaluate the competence of your general contractors based on their experience and expertise to undertake such projects
Practice our continuous professional development to effectively converge with decision-makers on the contractor bidding review and evaluation

It goes without saying that the latter serves as a prerequisite to the former item. Fair contractor evaluation is impossible without the engineering know-how driving the decision. Albeit selection criteria differs in structure, a levelized contractor bidding process is only possible through a specialized team of engineers who can give you the best value for your money in terms of meeting all project constraints. At Nearby EngineersNew York Engineers, we combine our expertise with integrity.

Understanding Contractor Bidding Process in the Building Life Cycle

All building projects start with design and end with maintenance or in some worst cases, demolition. In the middle of the building life cycle, their lies construction—and contractor bidding serves as a key criteria that you need to factor in to guarantee the success of your building projects.

As an expert engineering consulting firm, our expertise on contractor bidding enable us to work from both ends of the client and the contractor. Our specialized engineers can work for you as a third-party consultant or owner's representative, while contractors also hire us to provide design expertise on ongoing contract bids so they can win more projects effectively.

In the end, it all depends on the legal groundwork of the project contract as mandated by all stakeholders. But for uniformity's sake, our skilled engineers will walk you through each stages of the traditional contractor bidding, or design-bid-build (DBB):

Bid Solicitation

Once design development phase is over, consultants or project managers working on behalf of the client will issue a bid package consisting of construction documents, plans and specifications to all interested contractors. Whether you issue an open or sealed bid, this can go so far as to our engineers marking up quantity take-offs to levelize all incoming contractor bids.

Bid Evaluation

Since all contractor bids are leveled from a baseline reference, we can help you assess which bids meet your most exacting requirements depending on your cost, time and quality constraints. Value-engineering is what you can guarantee from Nearby EngineersNew York Engineers: high-quality, but reasonably-priced contractor bids.

Letter of Intent

After a thorough contractor bidding evaluation ranging from RFPs to BOMs and construction cost estimation, the project manager or consultants through the client's discretion will draft a letter of intent to the general or multi-prime contractors who successfully meet all technical and commercial compliance of your building project.

Contract Award

From here on out, client awards the contract and formally accepts the submitted bid of the best-among-the-rest contractor. This contract award can still be subject to negotiation, but overall, is inclusive of legal and contract documents, scope of work and early submittals prior to your tenderer's contract execution.

Start Date On-Site

Before contract execution in-situ, general contractors must submit construction deliverables in line with the submittal schedule to request approval from the architectural or consulting firm. All submittals undergo a rigorous review process and quality control under the hands of our meticulous engineers, so you are guaranteed of an optimized building system for your facility.

Understanding the trifecta of contractor bidding is your key to ensuring that your building project is well underway on its success. These three critical items in the selection criteria give you the surety that the general contractors manning behind the scenes are well-equipped to provide you a holistic building construction approach. In the next three sections, our specialized engineers show you the non-negotiable items to assess when you source multiple contractor bids for your building project.

Gaining a large exposure in the field helps us to manage all compliant tenderers from the non-compliant bidders. For technical compliance, our engineering consultant firm evaluates your potential contractor bids not only with the submitted proposal itself, but also on the experience and expertise of the tenderers to handle such complex projects.

Aside from the topnotch quality that we aim for when we evaluate the material data sheets and shop drawings of your tenderers, we also scrutinize your bidders' technical qualifications in light of labor allocations, insurances, resources, certifications and construction methodologies. At Nearby EngineersNew York Engineers, we examine the capability and competence of your contractors to do the job in a qualifications-based criteria.

Evaluating Cost Constraints in Contractor Bidding

Cash flow is the life blood of any building project. In order to maintain a healthy cash flow, it's important to have a baseline cost reference when you source multiple contractor bids for your project. This way, you can assess which contractors exceed or underestimate the cost through apple-to-apple comparison. As experienced consulting engineers, we know that low-bid proposals do not necessarily equate quality, as some other contractors only do so to win the project especially when procurement method asks for it.

As a middle point between the client and contractor, our professional engineers aim to seamlessly blend the client's increased savings with the contractor's higher profit through competitive and accurate bids. No such thing as 100% precision on contractor bids, but sealing the deal means the contractor hits close to your final construction cost estimation with a reasonable markup and contingency on labor and materials, all on top of technical compliance.

How Project Timelines Affect Contractor Bidding

When your building project is pressed for time in a fast-track construction, this can often lead in ripple effect on cost and quality constraints. Apart from the two factors we evaluate above, our skilled engineers assess the incoming contractor bids against the scheduled timeframe and critical path management of the building project. In short, we utilize our engineering expertise in discerning if your contractor will finish your building project in time for the scheduled handover.

Here's where excel: our core expertise on MEP building systems yield us an advantage in zeroing in on the critical path item of your building project—eliminating delays and change orders, all while conforming to specifications, performance standards and scheduled contractor payments as per the contract documents.

From the previous section, we gave you a learning curve on how each element works, and how you can merge all three factors to get the best value for your money. Regardless of whether your building occupancy leans on the residential or governmental type, Nearby EngineersNew York Engineers believe that even low tenders needed to have high quality despite structure differences in the contractor bids. In short, get the best bang for your buck with our professional value-engineering services.

When you hire us to perform contractor bidding as a third-party consultant or contractor's design team, we address over-engineered items and optimize your building systems so you can get a high-quality, but cost-effective contractor bids. We level the playing field on technical and financial standpoints so you can discern how each contractor gains an edge or lose out an advantage over its competitors on a specific MEP building package. Easy to see how one contractor outperforms the other so you can make the best decision for your building project.

Our target goal at Nearby EngineersNew York Engineers is to help you maximize the value and returns on your investment—whichever your involvement as a project stakeholder. We take our clients' best interests at heart and help them identify where we can yield them higher savings through owner-supplied materials. Our specialized engineers collaborate with architects, consultants and construction managers to zero in on the value-engineered design items to get your building services running up to speed.

From the contractor's end, we utilize our expertise on accurate contractor bidding to render them maximum profitability sans liquidated damages. Any discrepancies on underestimated or overestimated bid can lead to stakeholders paying more than what they owe, and this chain reaction can spell bankruptcy, hold orders and subpar materials if cash flow isn't held in parallel with quality standards.

How Technology Plays a Role in Contractor Bidding

All successful contractor bids come from accurate construction cost estimation, where the final price charged to the client minus the contractor's internal costs and expenses equates to the latter's profit.

Our skilled engineers show you all the tedious items you need to precisely calculate first before you can offer a competitive contractor bid:

Quantity take-offs
Bill of materials
Construction cost estimation

In a fast-paced world where efficiency beats expertise alone, winning more projects means you need to produce fast and quality results. It's no secret that BIM, cloud data computing, bid management and estimating software, and project management platforms are disrupting the AEC industry in this Information Age.

Digital intervention continuously complements all our engineering expertise, and a task that was once prone to human error can now be subject to automation—freeing up more of your time to bid confidently on more projects.

NY Engineers Deliver Expertise on Contractor Bidding

Any extremes from low to high-cost materials do not necessarily yield minimal or maximum value respectively. Often, clients assume direct proportional relationship between cost and value, when it could be reversed the other way around if only professional review was conducted. To get the best value means to remove implicit bias on the contractor and supplier relationships, and to review all technical compliance in line with financial aspects.

Fair game is where Nearby EngineersNew York Engineers enter. Scan our industry-specific projects and see how we continuously expand our engineering repertoire to help you land the best-valued contractor for your building project.

Get the most out of your building project's function-to-cost ratio through our competitive sourcing of construction tenders.

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Experts in contractor bidding