Aditya Chinni, PMP

Developing Qualified Sellers list & Proposals are the main goals of "Request Seller Responses" process. Bidder conference and Advertising are major tools provided in this area.



Advertisement is very much required to attract more bidders for your project. You should advertise extensively to gather more responses. Few of known formats are - internet, local papers, different print media like magazines, Conferences, vendor shows and so on. But all of those might not be necessary together. As advertisement is cumbersome and expensive normally companies establish preferred vendors list over the time.

Bidders Conference: Once you advertise and collected many responses from various bidders you should organize a conference to bring all bidders to same understanding page. You should clarify all technical questions. Each bidder will be beneficiary of other questions and can understand your requirements much better.
Bidder’s conference benefits both Bidders and you the project manager. You should document all questions and answers and send those to all bidders. In the bidder conference you should watch for Collusion. Collusion is secret agreement between bidders. And even you should watch for bidders who are not asking any types of questions either.

You should prepare your own Qualified Sellers list which is one of the out puts of this process.

Buyer prepares few documents for bidders. Few of those are
- RFP (Request for Proposal)
- IFB (Invitation for Bid) or RFB (Request for Bid)
- RFQ (Request for Quotation)
These documents can be used with different contract types as follows

Usage of documents as shown above even makes sense. For Unit price contracts you will ask a quotation at unit level. And you would ask bidders for a proposal where scope is not yet prepared or unknown.