Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Construction Management for Contractor : Pre-tender Stage



 

 

 
Stage 1: Pretender / prebidding Planning or Management
Stage 1 will always taken place after contractor received notice of tender which usually being advertised through electronic medium or convention medium that is through news paper. Notice of tender also sometime being mailed to contractor by the parties who call for the tender. This type of tender usually call invited tender.
The duration taken for completion of this stage heavily depend on the following;

  1. Type of tender: Conventional, Design and build or invited tender.

  2. Size or value of project .(Value of project most of the time is confidential by the party who call for tender .In Malaysia scenario the value of project will determine the category of contractor that can participate in the tender.

  3. Amount of information that needs to be disclosing by the tenderers.
In normal practice, the duration of the tendering process for Design and Build tender is from four (4) weeks to 3 months and usually it being break into two (2) stages which are prequalification stage and tender stage. The information that needs to be submitted during the tendering stage is the background of the contractor such as

  1. financial background

  2. current project

  3. previous experience

  4. registration as required under the condition of prequalification

  5. Plant, machineries or equipment of the contractor

  6. Professional (qualified technical and administration) staff of the contractor.
After screening by the party who call for tender, the contractor who pass the requirement of the prequalification will be notify and they are required to submit a complete tender document. This process is call prebidding stage or tender stage. At this stage, contractor will start to engage the following professional;

  1. Design team to do the design for them.

    1. Professional Architect

    2. Professional Civil Engineer

    3. Professional Structure Engineer

    4. Professional Project Manager Consultant

    5. Professional Mechanical Engineer

    6. Professional Electrical Engineer and

    7. Professional Quantity Surveyor
The design team then will come out with the tender drawing or plan that will be submitted together with the tender document. The role of the project manager is to come out with the proposed work program with the help of all parties to feed him the relevant data in order for him to develop an almost accurate work program which then resulted to the duration of construction period that is needed to accomplish to work.
Where as, for the Professional Quantity Surveyor will work on the builder cost inclusive of all preliminaries and generally item which then will be compiled to form a complete tender document.
As for Conventional tender contractor will only have to submit their pricing and background information. The background information is the same as the Design and Build prequalification stage.
Under the pretender planing or management, In general, it will involve the following stage;

  1. Decision to participate in tender

  2. Purchase of tender document

  3. Pre tender meeting

  4. Construction method

  5. Cost Estimate stage

  6. Pretender work program

  7. Decision on overall tender pricing to be submitted and

  8. Submission of the tender document.

 
All of the information provided above is a good practice in pretender planing or management. In actual of fact, the above mention stages and information heavily depend on the organisation it self. Different organisation have different approach on how their pretender planing or management going to be. Some of the stages might no be necessary for small scale project which intended for small scale contractor which the owner himself could be able to do all the stages. This mean that the above stages, especially the pre tender meeting is not required. Then this stage will not be applicable to them.