Managing and Awarding a Bid (Video)

Transcript:

Thank you for joining us for managing and awarding a bid.
In our earlier training we posted our bid for the new office for Planet Bids staff, and it's currently out to bid.
And we went in and made a slight edit, and it allowed us to make those edits without doing any kind of notice because we didn't have any prospective bidders yet.
This point we're going to jump over to the vendor site and see what happens on their end.
If I go over to the vendor portal and I go into the bid opportunities, and I'm taking a look at all the opportunities that are out there, once I find the project that I'm interested in, I will select it.
I will see everything that we just created, including the type of project, what I need to submit, general information, including any preferences that you may be giving, the Estimated bid value, that's that range we talked about.
And then the bonding requirements.
Because there is a pre-bid meeting and it has not passed, I can RSVP.
That's gonna require a login from the vendor.
We're gonna do that elsewhere.
And then here we can see we set up the Q &A deadline, our contact information, and some general information about the project.
If I go to the line items tab as a vendor, I will be able to see all of your line items including the unit price if we're using the public works template and I can export. Export will require a login.
If I go to the documents tab you can see the notice of inviting bid which is typically your notice in the newspaper or on the wall.
Your vendors will be able to walk up to the wall read that notice, open up the newspaper, read that without identifying themselves.
But if they want the plans, specs, drawings, etc., then they're going to reach out to you and ask for them, and that's when you're going to place their information on your list.
So the same process is going to happen here within the system.
So as you can see over here, we have a download and view, and because this file here does not have an asterisk in it, I can download or view it no big deal.
Here's my document, and I can go ahead download it.
However, any of the documents with an asterisk, if I try to download or view, it is going to require me to log in.
And if I come over here to where it says download all, to download each of these into one zip folder, because at least one is private, I'm going to have to log in.
I'm going to do that now.
Now that I've logged in, again, I can download the first one because it's private, no big deal.
But any of the ones that are marked private, whether I do a download all or individual, I'm still not going to be able to download yet.
It's going to warn me that I am going to become a prospective bidder.
We want the public to understand what the next step is.
Here it's going to bring up their prospective bidders information and they can come in here and change it if they to.
And if I come in here and alter that email address, from this point on, any information on this bid, rather than going to the original person on the prospective bidders list information, it's now going to go to whoever they changed it to. So it allows your vendors to manage the bid opportunities in their agency.
They are going to be able to say, it's going to allow your vendors to manage their bid notifications and bid participation for their company per project.
They are now able to have a single person get all the bid alerts in and say Joe you handle this and Sally you handle that.
It is not going to affect any future bids nor any other bids that are going on.
It will only affect the one that we're updating.
If we are using the Public Works template or if you have advanced debidding for Public Works and are using the professional services template, then we're gonna ask the vendor if they're going to be a prime, a sub, supplier, or other.
The other templates or professional services, if you do not have advanced debidding for Public Works, they will not ask for the classification.
All templates will ask and default the vendor to bidder status.
They can change their status at any time from non-bidder no communication or non-bidder still receive communication.
The second the vendor changes it to either non-bidder, it will ask them why and your list of non-bidder status reasons which can be maintained in the Admin Forbidden Management non-bidder status reasons section.
Your vendors will also have another please explain and they can type in their reason.
Please note the second your vendor hits done if they are in either non-bidder status they will not be able to change their status back to bidder.
For vendors that is a one-way street they can go from bidder to non but never back again.
If they contact Planet Biz and says the agency said it was okay we are not going to do that we can't trust vendor, we don't know what's happened on your procurement.
You will be the only one who can place the vendor back into bidder status.
If you have a pre-bid meeting and so long as a pre-bid meeting has not passed, they can come in here and RSVP and they can come in and list how many people will be coming from their company.
Once I hit done, I am now on your prospective bidders list you will notice there is now a download column.
If I go to the perspective bidders tab, you can see that I am now on there as well as any other vendors who are participating in your project.
We can see their type, their status, if they attended your pre-bid meeting, and any classification.
So this way vendors can network with one another.
They will be able to return to their profile and edit at any time. Down here at the bottom is the Place E-Bid button.
Each agency has the ability to make the download portion of the bid process mandatory or optional. Please contact your Planet Bids representative to make it mandatory.
Down here at the bottom it will say Place E-Bid.
If you have the mandatory option on, when the vendors click on Place E-Bid, it will check the Documents tab and take them directly to the documents tab if they're missing at least one document download. And now if I click on download you can see it's recording it.
I'm going to do this first one a few times.
Now the other two documents when I go to download them, again it's not going to let me.
This is the option that I explained on the documents tab that there is a check box at the bottom of the documents tab to the left that in order you to select it you do in admin for bid management settings must have the very first text box populated.
A lot of agencies will use this function when Homeland Security gets involved in their projects where Homeland Security has a statement the vendors must agree to before they can obtain the private bid documents.
Here we're using the statement from the Cincinnati airport. Once we hit accept, now I can go ahead and download them.
Again, these are individual downloads or I can go over here to download all to download the entire set into a zip folder.
As a vendor, I have placed my name on your prospective bidders list, I have RSVP to the pre-bid meeting, and I've downloaded all of your documents. I now may have some questions.
Over here on the right, they're going to see the deadline.
They must submit all questions by this date and time. So long as it has not passed, they will be able to ask a question.
If an admin for bid management settings in box 2, which refers to the Q &A section, if you have a message in there, then any bid where Q &A is enabled, the message will appear up here at the top.
This is a great area to remind your vendors please ask one question at a time or reference this section.
Now here you can see I have a red underline.
We do have spell check for both you and your vendor and they can either click on it with the left hand.
They can click on it to go in and select from the list, add to the list.
We even have spell check to help with Vendors can click on add question and add as many questions as they need to.
They can do attachments, such as will you approve these alternate specs.
They can remove the attachments and they can remove the question, but they must hit submit before your deadline.
When they hit submit, the vendor is going to get a green pop-up confirming the submission as well as an email.
and then you and your internal and then you and everybody listed on the Q &A notification list will receive an email letting you know that a vendor has submitted questions. Notice we do not see what those questions are here.
We do this on purpose. You never know what your vendors are going to ask.
It can be inappropriate. It could be start of a protest.
We do not want that information to be out there for everybody to see.
All right.
At this point, I'm done doing everything that I need to do as a vendor up to this point.
So we're going to return to your side of the system, the hub.
And we're going to go into bid management.
And we're going to look at our project.
First thing I'm going to do is click Edit to release the form and make some changes.
You'll notice that I'm going to go directly to the perspective bidders tab.
So in our previous training, we covered bid information, line items, and documents, and we're now going to go to the next tab.
The prospective bidders is everybody who's interested so far in the project.
We can select a vendor to review their information and change anything that needs to be altered.
We can record their attendance, we can change their classification, we can change their bidder status.
We will see how they came about and further down we'll see if they RSVP'd and who's coming and every single download they've done.
Once we issue an addenda we'll even see if whether or not they've acknowledged those addendas.
Over here on the right you can hide the display of the prospective bidders list on the public site. You can do this the second your bid is live.
You can also hide the pre-bid meeting column.
Add, it's not too typical that you will add vendors to your prospective bidders list.
Where you would do so is if the vendor attends a pre-bid meeting and they're not already on the list and you want to record their attendance, or you are accepting paper bids, and the vendor found out the bid through a third party and is now turning in the bid to you.
They may not be on this list, and so you will need to add them order to enter in their bid results.
I'm going to go ahead and add a vendor right now by clicking add.
It is going to warn you that any vendors you manually add to the prospective bidders list will not get a new bid alert notice, but they will get all other notices sent to the vendor community. We hit okay.
At this point I can click on company name to search your vendor database or I can click on create vendor to create a profile for that vendor if they do not exist.
Let me go ahead and pick a vendor.
Now that I've picked a vendor, it's going to populate their information.
And again, I can make alterations if I need to.
I can record their attendance.
I can mark if they're going to be a prime, a sub-supplier, or other, their status, and mark if they're going to be attending my pre-bid or not, add any future attendees. We hit done and now the vendor is on my list.
At this point anytime you add prospective bidders it's always a safe measure to save your bid at that point and then come back and make other edits.
While it's not necessary to do so it's a good fail-safe just in case.
Now that I have my prospective bidders here, Update Multiple.
Now that I have all my prospective bidders here, let's go to Update Multiple. Once my pre-bid meeting has passed, we'll see Attend Pre-Bid Meeting.
We can select it and say yes or no.
I can come over here to the left-hand side and individually select vendors or select them all and then uncheck for any that did not attend.
I can then hit save and it's now updated the pre-bid meeting list.
For anybody that did not attend, we will say no and we will go ahead and select them.
The next question you have to ask yourself, is my pre-bid meeting mandatory or not?
If it was mandatory, it's not enough to simply say no, they did not attend.
You must then change their status from prospective bidder to bidder, sorry, from bidder to non-bidder.
It is not enough to change their status from bidder to non-bidder.
It is not enough to state that they did not attend the pre-bid meeting.
You must change their prospective bidder status from bidder to non-bidder.
It will be your call if you wish to continue to allow them to receive communication or no communication.
If you mark no communication, they will no longer show up on the public side of the prospective bidder's list.
They will always show up on your side.
By marking them a non-bidder, the system will prevent them from submitting an offer.
If you leave them in bidder status, we will allow them to submit.
You can also leave a comment and hit save. Send email.
You can create a custom email to all of your prospective bidders.
If your pre-bid meeting has not passed you will be able to send a pre-bid meeting reminder.
If the bid has not closed you can send them a bid closing reminder.
You can also in admin for bid management under settings, schedule a reminder of the bid closing to go out.
Prospective bidders with a status non-bidder are communications are excluded from all emails.
Once this project closes, there will be an additional email that you can generate, and that is the non-bidder survey email.
Anybody who is in bidder status but did not actually submit an offer will receive an email asking them to update their profile and state why they did not submit.
The system can also be triggered within admin bid management settings to generate that email on your behalf.
If you are going to accept paper bids, please make sure that we do not generate that email until you've entered in all of the bid results.
Document download report.
The document download report will track every vendor who has downloaded those documents and when.
So here you can see that both Copper Kettles and We Do It All downloaded the Notice of Inviting bid multiple times in the timestamp.
For Plans 2, both downloaded only once, and for Plans 1 Copper Kettles downloaded Plans 1 twice.
You can export this list. Status Reasons report.
When your vendors go to mark themselves non-bidder, They will be able to select from one of the options and this report will let you know what all of your vendors selected.
This is an excellent way to find out why your vendors are not participating in a particular project so that when you go to council you can answer that question.
Should we go back out to bed or should we award sole source?
Pre-bid meeting RSVP.
Here before the pre-bid meeting we can run the report and see who's going to attend.
who's not attending and who has not responded.
And we can see how many people are coming from each company.
And then finally, you can export your entire perspective bidders list.
Q &A.
On the Q &A tab, you'll be able to see all the questions that have been submitted by your vendors.
If you select a question, you'll be able to see which vendor asked the question and their original question, and you'll be able to answer it.
On some questions, let me collapse this one and expand, sometimes your vendors they might not ask the full question or there's a correction that needs to be made.
We really don't want to have this one released the way it's listed right now. Let me go into my, now let's go to Q &A.
Q &A is going to list all the questions that have been submitted by your vendors and if you click on a it will expand. You can also select Expand All and Collapse All.
Let's take a look at this question here.
The vendor looks like they started to ask a question and maybe didn't finish it.
You'll notice that we are in edit mode, but I can't edit this question.
We're not going to allow you to edit the question the vendor submitted.
You want to keep that history in case there's a protest, but You can reach out to the vendor and ask for clarification.
If there is still time, you'll want to ask them to resubmit the question.
If there is no more time for Q &A, you can ask them for the clarification and click Add New and retype the question yourself.
You can call up some questions here.
Notice up at the top we have a Release QA and then Export.
An export will release all of the An export will record all of the questions and answers that are listed here.
It will also record the vendor's names.
You can always export the data and provide that export to your subject matter expert.
Please note that the export will contain the vendor's names, so you may need to clean that export up.
Over here, we're going to go ahead and expand all and start to answer these questions.
We do not have an import at this time because the order of your questions may have changed by the time you get the answers back from your subject matter expert, but you can always copy and paste or simply type in.
We also have word prediction.
You can see here it's starting to predict that I'm going to type in the word acceptable and I can hit tab to complete it.
Now at this point I'm not going to touch my mouse and simply going to hit tab and now cursor is in the next questions answer box and then tab again.
I'm going to skip this one because we're not going to answer it.
This was the incomplete question that we've already recreated and answered at the top.
I'm going to hit tab one more time and now I've moved immediately to the next questions answer box.
Once I've gone through all the questions I can come up to the top and collapses. You'll notice over here on the left-hand side the checkboxes.
I can see at a glance that I did not answer this third one because the box is grayed out.
At this point, if I were to hit save and publish, my vendor community will not know that I've answered any of the questions.
So you are able to work on your questions, save them, come back, and work some more.
When you're ready to your questions, you will have to click Release QA.
In order to release your Q &A, you must select at least one question.
I'm going to come back here and select. Notice you do not have to go in any kind of order.
Now when I select Release QA, I'm given a choice, email or an addendum.
Did this Q &A affect our sometimes they're just asking for parking or what time to show up for it.
So those don't really warrant an addendum.
We're going to go ahead and click email.
It's going to tell you what our email states and here you can go ahead and add additional messaging as well as any files.
You have no limit on the number of files. I'm going to go ahead and hit save.
It's now moved those to the bottom of the list and they are pending until I hit submit and publish.
And now my questions have been released to everybody on the perspective bidders list, not just the vendors who asked the questions.
Don't worry they don't see who asked the questions. Let's go back into the edit bid. Let's go back to Q &A.
Let's go release the last of the questions here.
And now when I release Q &A I'm and do it as an addendum. I'm going to put my addenda number in, can be alpha numeric symbol.
It will default the title and the description, but you can alter, change it, add to it, and again you can add as many files as you need to. And then hit done.
It's now our second set, and again when I come in here and hit save and publish, off it goes to everybody on the bidders list. Go back into our bid one more time to Q &A and click edit.
I do not have to release all questions, but we are going to track every release that you do.
Which method, email, or addenda, the date, the time, and how many questions within.
And again, I can drill in or I can expand or collapse them.
When we have Q &A, sometimes we'll get 200 questions in and you need to get those questions to a manner expert.
You may not want to copy and paste all 200 answers back into the system, and that's fine. You don't have to.
All you need to do is once you export it, send it to your subject manner expert and get the answers back, clean up the report, and then jump over to the addenda and email tab.
Any emails you've issued elsewhere in the system are going to show up here.
Any addendas you issue anywhere else through this bid system.
Any addendas you issue anywhere within the bid are going to show up here. You'll be able to click on it to expand it. You can also recall it.
If you recall it you can reuse your addenda number. Over here we have the post.
To post a new addenda you can come in here and select it, type in your addenda number, your title, and your description as well any attachments. Now notice I'm using the same addenda number we used earlier.
No matter where I do an addenda within this project, when I hit done, it's always going to check to make sure that I've not used that number already. Let me go ahead and change that number and hit done.
And again it is pending until I save and publish. Below is the email history.
Any emails that we've sent out so we are going to record who was on the Notify list, we are going to record who was on the prospective bidders list at the time the notification was sent.
Send acknowledgement reminders and view addenda acknowledgments.
View acknowledgments is going to show you everybody on your prospective bidders list, if you have a pre-bid meeting did they attend or not, and each addenda and whether or not they've acknowledged it.
We don't see addenda 2 yet because we and saved it.
Send acknowledgement reminder, if I trigger it, will send an addenda acknowledgement reminder to every vendor who has not acknowledged all addenda. Let me hit save and publish.
All right, at this point I'm going to jump back over to the vendor side.
So a vendor has been receiving all of the communications regarding Q &A and the addendas. So let's go take a look at that.
Now that I'm back on the vendor side, I'm going to go ahead and open up our project.
And you can see here on the perspective bidders list, we've got all three vendors.
We can see they're a non-bidder, but they're going to still receive communication.
And they're not going to, and they did not attend the previous meeting.
On the Q &A, we can see each release set, how it was released and when and I can drill in to see all the questions, drill in further and see the full question and the answer.
But notice we do not see which vendor asks the question.
The vendor community can expand all and collapse all and print Addendas and emails.

Here are all of your addendas and if I click on it you'll see that each addenda has its own acknowledgement and here's your Now I'm deliberately going to go to a different tab. It doesn't matter which tab I'm on. Down here at the very bottom, you can see the status of my bid. So long as I'm logged in, I know whether or not I've started one or not and what stage it's in. Every time I click on Play Seabid, we are going to date timestamp it. The first thing we're going to look at is the Documents tab if you have the document download setting. Here I've already downloaded this document. When I click on Place E-Bid again, it's going to record that action, and it's going to check the addendas. Vendors must acknowledge every single addenda in order to submit a bid electronically. Once they click on Place E-Bid and they've acknowledged all addenda, they will then agree to your terms and conditions message, which can be found in Admin, Bid Management Settings. At this point, if you have the PIN process turned on, I will have to enter in my PIN number. My demo site does not have the PIN process enabled. The next thing they're going to have to agree to is the plan of bids welcome message. And here we are going to let them know that they must fully submit their bid in time. What that means is you hit accept, you'll see down here there's a submit button. It's not enough for the vendor to hit submit at one second till. They must submit in enough time for all data to be fully transferred from their server to ours. If in the middle of transferring that data the bid closes, we must reject their bid. That's the letter of the law, we must follow it. Now that I'm in the submission area, we have a save, a cancel, submit, and withdraw. We are going to date timestamp which button they select, and if we select save, you can see it tells me that we're saving it as a draft, and if I get out, we can see my status is draft. When I come back in and accept your message, enter the PIN if you have PIN enabled, I am now back into the submission area. I can edit or withdraw my response, but if I hit submit, it's going to say, are you sure you wish to submit to and your agency name? Once I hit OK, it's going to do validation. Anything that was mandatory is going to tell me which tab I need to go to and what field that is mandatory that I failed to complete. They must complete all mandatory items in order to submit. On the detail tab which every bid will have they will see their company information and if they're using the public works template They will see their license and any special classification designation that we set speak to your account executive about that Over here, we're gonna say who's submitting on behalf of that company and I can leave a comment EBid instructions Remember, when we are creating our bid and we're saying that we want the vendors to submit electronic only or electronic in paper, there's a courtesy box set up here. This is where the courtesy message will appear, so as you can see, paper bidders will never get to this area, so they'll never see it. Attachments. If you have advanced debidding for Public Works and you are enabling to allow the vendor to submit a cashier's check in lieu of a bid bond. In admin for bid management, setting box number four, you will be able to put in instructions for the delivery of the cashier's check. It will be the same message for all bids. So here, the vendor can either select cashier's check. You can see the bid bond here says required, and there's a place for me to upload a file. If I check cashier's check, then the file is no longer needed. And if I uncheck it, then I can come in here and select my bid bond, and here we're going to do an e-bond for Purity 2000, and you can see that I can no longer select the cashier's checkbox. Anything that we marked required, vendor must upload a file. Vendor can remove a file and upload another file. Each one of these is one file upload. If you've not provided the vendor enough places to upload files and so long as there's at least one placeholder for a file they can always do it as a zip folder and we do have attached and we do have instructions on how to create a zip folder for you and your vendors in the Help Center. If you have Advanced Debidding for Public Works you can click on the subcontract. If you have Advanced Debidding for public works enabled on your project, your vendor will be able to click on subcontractors. Here they can say no subs, or they must add at least one sub. When adding a sub, they're going to select name and be able to search your vendor database. So if a vendor exists, fantastic, they simply select it, and it's gonna auto-populate all the information from their profile. And here they can come in and put the value if there are going to be entering a value, maybe needed at zero, and the type of work they're going to be doing. We can put hyperlink connections for licensing and any third-party tracking, and that will allow the prime to verify that their subcontractor has the correct licensing or third-party designation that you're looking for. Here in California, the DIR is a requirement, so we've enabled it for California agencies. When the vendor goes to select add new and they search your database and their subcontractor does not exist, they can go ahead and click on create vendor and fill this out. The second they fill it out and hit submit, just like for you, the sub is going to receive an email stating that a temporary profile has been created with their login information and it's going to ask them to update their profile. It is not temporary, it is permanent, but this time what it's going to do is save your prime time the next time they need to use that particular subcontractor. They will now exist in your database and when you send out a bid notice, it could potentially increase your outreach as well as increasing the potential for that subcontractor. Your prime can add and remove and edit subs as often as needed up until bid closing. Line items. Because we failed validation for line items, it's highlighting which line I've missed, otherwise we'll see it in green. So here I'm going to go ahead and put my pricing in. Now notice for this one, the quantity is 1500 and I entered in a unit price of five. It's automatically going to do the line extension and as I start to enter in the pricing for each line, It's going to be doing the subtotaling, as well as the grand total. And for vendors, they can simply click Enter after each value to go down the list. Here, because we're using the Public Works template, we've locked in this value. No matter how much I click on it, I cannot change that value. Vendor can hit Enter to go down the list, or they can hit Tab to go to the comments field and make a comment and tab again. Your vendors do have the ability to put in a negative value as well. Once they have all of this information the way they want it, again they can save it as a draft and come back and edit or they can hit submit. Once they have successfully submitted they will receive a confirmation email and a confirmation pop-up with their confirmation number and date and timestamp. They can also click on summary to print everything that they just submitted to you and they can see that submission here including all the subcontractors. Once they move away from it the only way to return is to click on place eBid again. So here you can notice my status is submitted when I and I can click on place eBid to edit it. All right, now we're gonna return back to our bid and we're gonna go back to the bid from the buyer's perspective, the back of the agency. And here's our project. And I'm gonna go ahead and open it. And let's talk about a couple of things. Here, we can still see we've got a day remaining. And if I go to bid results, I can see that one vendor has already submitted their offer, and if I click on edit, notice even as I click on this, it does not open and I do not see pricing at all. All bids are sealed and locked until the bid closes. At any time while it's bidding, you can override the bid result display, put in public notes, change how much of the bid pricing you want shown, no pricing, everything, so line items, subtotal, grand, sub and grand total or grand total only, show status, did you mark them responsive, so you can't do that until the bid closes, but do you want to display that column, yes or no, and do you want to display any comments that you might leave on their bid once you review them. Show the responsiveness once you determine that, but don't show the comment, or let's not show anything. The vendor's name, address, and who submitted on behalf of the company, or just the company's name. If you're doing an RFI, RFE, or a Qual, there will also be a show ranking. Now obviously, some of this will not be able, some of this you will not be able to do until the bid actually closes. But we can get everything prepped and set up. Let's back up just a tiny bit. Addenda's an email. We're gonna go back to View Addenda Acknowledgement. Notice Copper Kettle has acknowledged every addenda. We're gonna track every acknowledgement they do. And let's go back a little bit further to the line item. And let's remove one line item. And I'm going to hit Save. Confirm bid edit notification. This bid currently has eBidders. Please issue an addendum. This is very important to understand about the system. In the first training that we did, setting up and posting our project, we were able to make a change without any notification and that's because we did not have any prospective bidders. If you make a change on your bid and you have prospective bidders, but no bidders. When you make that change, we are going to give you a warning letting you know you have interested parties. What do you want to do? Cancel the change. Make the change without pointing it out to anybody, but you're changing. Send a general email or a formal addendum. The second you have a prospective bidder and you change something on the system, we are going to and addenda. We do this on purpose. We're moving into the electronic world and we need to make sure that everything in the system is matching what's saying in your bid documents. So if there's a discrepancy and you're changing the system to match the documents, vendors can take that as a reason to protest and we want to prevent that. We don't want any excuses for your vendors and in 23 years we've never had a valid protest on the system. Now that I've made that when I go to hit save bid, I will now be forced to do an addendum. Before I do that, I want to point out over here, my vendor who submitted their status says submitted. The second I come in here and save my bid, addendum, and do addendum 3, removed line, I don't remember five, changes, let me just do an attachment, obviously if this was a real bid we'd have better data in there for our vendors, let's hit done and publish. And let's go back into our bid and take a look at bid results. And now we can see that the vendor who submitted initially is invalidated. Once vendors have submitted, if you issue an addenda, those vendors will get a special email. It will let them know that the addenda was issued and their bid is now invalidated. And they must do two things. They must acknowledge the addenda and resubmit their bid. We do that on purpose. We need them to confirm that there were no changes based on your addenda. All right. In a second here, going to go back to being a vendor. Okay, I'm back as the vendor and looking at our project and here you can see I just did the time so we only have one minute left but down at the bottom you can see it says invalidated. If I go over to the Q &A, sorry if I go over to the addenda tab you can see the new addenda and I must acknowledge it. That does not change my status at all. I must click on place eBit, accept, and then enter pin number if you're using the pin system, and either hit submit or hit edit to make the necessary changes. But I must hit submit and hit okay and have the data transferred before the bit closes. So we have 39 seconds. We're gonna pause the recording until we get closer. All right, we have 10 seconds left on our project. keep your eye on the bid results tab. When the bid closes, the bid results will automatically be available. Do you see that? Just changed. That's an automatic public bid opening. Please check your area's public contracting code as well as your own policies and procedures. But so long as it says that you have to read it off only if somebody requests it, which most public contracting codes will say, that means you do not actually have to have a Zoom meeting to read off the bid results, you just need to have them available. The only time you need to have a meeting is somebody wants you to verbally read it off. Here, now that the bid is closed, we can go into bid results and see who submitted electronically. Again, we can see the public comment that you put out there. We can hide everything altogether or show just the company name or name, address, and who submitted. If showing anything with name, we are going to show any types that they hold. And notice as I hold my mouse over that area, there's a tooltip that explains what each designation means. The bid amount can be completely hidden or shown. Here it's grand total. And if I drill in, I'll see more detail. And the responsiveness is blank until you determine the responsibility. With values, we can drill in to see who submitted on behalf of that company. If you are using advanced debidding, we can now see all the subcontractors and we can see the line item pricing that was submitted. This is a public bid, which means anybody from the public, they do not have to have participated in this project, you can see this information. All right, I am going to go to two other projects. Here, this is a Public Works bid. We can see all the bidders on it. And this particular vendor, their total bid was $2.1 million. And if I go over to the awards tab, and again, we have a place for award notes to the public. But you can see up here that we are displaying who we awarded it to, and the value. It's the same vendor that we were just looking at on bid results, but the value is different. The reason for that, as you can see, this bid had multiple sections. Base bid, alternate, not included in the award, alternate too, not included in the award. You can see it says not included over here on the right. Because of that, the value being shown is only the awarded section. Up here at the top you can award to one or multiple vendors. This is called a lump sum award when we're displaying it up here at the top and it relates to the entire project. Let's go look at a different bit. On this particular project we can come in here and we can see the vendors and their individual pricing. This is their grand total or we can drill in and see all the line pricing. One thing to note when you're doing line item bids using the quick quote, general, and the professional services bid. There will be an extra column that we do not see on the public works and that is response. Here the vendor can mark yes they are responsive to the line or no they're not. On your end it will show up as new bid. And if I go over to awards, you can see instead of the award information being at the top, the award information is in each line, with or without the values being shown. You can award each line to one or multiple vendors, or different vendors altogether, or not award at all. And that navigates the entire system for the vendor community. Now we're going to jump back and finish the bid from your point of view. So here we're going to go ahead and we can see our new office for planet bids tab and we're going to go to the bid results tab. Here is the vendor that submitted electronically and at this point because the bid is closed we can see the value. I can click on it to drill in and again if we're tracking license types we can verify that as well as any third party classification that you need. We can see who submitted on behalf of the company. We can see all of their attachments. We can individually download or view their attachments or download all. If I go into edit mode, if the vendor has submitted a cashier's check in lieu of bid bond, we can record that they, that we received this cashier's check on time. Subcontractor's tab, we can see if they selected no subs or all the subs that they've listed. And again, we can expand and check the subs licensing and any third party designation. Line item, we can then look at all of the line item pricing. Let me hit done. Up here at the top, if we are going to accept paper bids, you must enter the paper bids into the system in order for us to do further reporting for you. You do not have to do this, but it is highly recommended. When adding a vendor into the system, you'll simply click on name and find your prospective bidder. This is going to be everybody off your prospective bidders list who is not a non-bidder or you did not already submit electronically. The difference between a paper bid and Electronic bid is who's doing the data entry, you or them, and validation. You have no validation. You do have a place to record when you receive that paper submission. You can set it before the bid closing. You can record who submitted on behalf of that company. If you wanna scan and upload attachments, you can. Subcontractors, you can list their subs if you so choose, or say no sub, and then line item pricing. So I can come in here and put in the pricing for that vendor. And again, you're not going to be able to adjust that value because you set that in the bid. That's too much. There we go. I'm going to go ahead and hit done. Once you have entered in all of your paper bids, you must hit save to lock that information in. And let's go ahead and change our status that we're searching by from bidding to closed. So we can see all of our closed bids. Now when I come in here to hit edit and I go to bid result, what I want to point out, the reason I locked in all of our bid results is I want to run the report. If you're doing all electronic bids the second your bid closes, you can instantly come in and click report and it's going to compare all of your bidders side by side. Over here we have highlight, who is the lowest by line, lowest by section, total bid, or all lowest. Watch what happens to the value if I uncheck a section. It just recalculated and I have a new bidder. You can also uncheck a line and it will recalculate. If the highlights are on when you hit export, the highlights will go into the export. Update multiple. Here you can delete bids. You can only delete paper bids in case you made a data entry error. Responsiveness. In order to award to a you must mark them responsive. So here I'm going to go ahead and say yes and I can individually select or select all and hit save. With update multiple you can also leave a buyer comment within the bid. If I open up the individual vendor now you can see that they're now responsive and here's where I can leave a buyer comment as well. And over here on the far right I can see the responsiveness column, send email. Notice that the send email says zero recipients. There are two different ways to run the send email on the bid results tab. Notice that if I individually select both vendors, it has the vendor's names. This is a private communication to just those vendors. They do not know that each other are getting the message. This is great for when you're doing an RFP, I want to send them a notice to do their shortlist presentation. If however I select the select all button, notice it now says just bidders. This is a public message. It will not only go to all the bidders, they will be posted publicly for everybody to see. Finally we have export. There are two different exports that you can generate and it lays out the bid submission information into different formats. You can save this and come back and when you're ready, you can go over to the awards tab. The award status, you can change it from close to award pending, that is your intent to award, awarded, canceled, rejected. When you select award pending, you can backdate the award, put in internal notes, do I want display the award on the public site, and if I do, do I want the value to be shown as well. And you have a place for public notes. You can come over here to award 2 and select whichever vendor you wish to select. You do not have to go with the lowest value because we know that you're usually checking other documentation to make sure they're qualified as well. Once you hit done, you can come in here and unchecked sections or add them back in. You can select one or more vendors. This is a lump sum bidding selection. Let me go ahead and just select the one. When it is award pending or awarded, when you go to hit save bid, an email will pop up. This is your intent to award or award statement. You can see what our message says and then you can add your own statement and your own attachments. You do not have to send this message. If I hit don't send and save my bid, when I come back in and edit, I'll be able to send it. So you can do this in the future if you need to. I'm going to go ahead and hit save and submit and now the notice is sent to all of my bidders that I have now awarded the project. Before we continue on on that one project I want to go ahead and open up an RFP that we've done. This one here if I go to the bid results tab you can see over here it says release cost file and if I select on the bidder and I Go to Attachments. You can see I've got a cost file, the response file, non-collusion. I can get the response file and non-collusion, but I cannot get that cost file. Reason for that is you might be part of the evaluation team and not able to look at cost yet. When you're ready, you will simply click Edit. And at the top of the Bid Results tab, you will see release cost file.And at the top of the Bid Results tab, you will see Need to Bid.
At the top of the Bid Results tab you will see Release Cost File.
We will check mark that, save it, submit, and then when you come back into the project it's going to record that you released it and when.
And now if I go back into that project and look at the attachments you can see I can download or open the cost file.
All right let's go back into that bid that we were on and finish this up.
So our bid is now in awarded stage, so let me search by awarded, or I can come in here and clear that and just search by office.
I'm going to go ahead and open this up. Reports.
Again, the project participation report is available the second you are live, so this is every vendor who participated in the bid, and if I click on bidder, it's going to reorganize it.
I can see how they submitted their amounts, award amount, and any outreach.
I can also run this by ethnicity and gender if I'm tracking that, and search by my different target groups.
I can do it by classification, and finally cost savings.
With the cost savings report, if you remember on the bid information tab, we entered an engineer's estimate, or if we were using the other tabs, the target bid amount.
Now that we've awarded the project, if we go to cost savings, that blue line was our estimate. Here is the awarded amount, highest, mean, median, and lowest bid.
So here you can see that on this particular project we saved 32%, which was 161,000 and some change.
If I get out of this bid and I have my search results, up here at the top we also have numerous reports that you can run on your search results.
Bid activity — it's a high comprehensive activity report based upon the different stages, outreach, which template you used, which type of RFX you're doing.
We have a high-level bid activity summary.
Bid counts, which is great for managers, will show you all the bids that are mine — which buyer, which department, what template you tend to use the most, and what project types.
We can do awards by classifications, so this is at the prime level.
If you have advanced eBidding for Public Works, we can also do it at the subcontractor level.
And then finally, we have cost savings.
The cost savings here is all the projects in my search results — what was the target amount, the award amount, did we go over or under.
So ultimately, you can see how much you saved your agency overall.
And then finally we have an export.
This will export all of your awarded bids, the bid values of each bidder, and who you awarded it to.
And that concludes the bid management training.

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