Tender work is often lonely work
A tender takes time and demands resources, and the responsibility rarely rests on more than one person. Sometimes that is a bid manager. More often it is someone who was handed the role along the way: in small and medium-sized companies, not rarely the CEO or the head of sales.
That person has to keep track of every mandatory requirement, every attachment, every clarification that arrived through questions and answers, and write at the same time. Having someone else read it with fresh eyes before submission is the cheapest way to avoid a rejected tender.
What we check
We read the tender documents and the tender against each other, requirement by requirement. We go through whether every mandatory requirement has an answer, and whether the answer says what the requirement asks for. We check that every attachment asked for is included, in the right version and within any time limits.
We also check against what was said in questions and answers, since clarifications there often change the conditions. And we review the upload in the procurement system. The files have to sit in the right place, be readable and stay within the system's limits.
We normally do the review a couple of days before the deadline, so there is time to fix what we find.
When an outside review is worth it
If you are alone in being responsible for the tender meeting every requirement, and are unsure whether it does, that is the moment. The same goes for when the contract is large enough that a missed formality gets expensive, or when you are bidding in a procurement of a kind you have not done before.
For a company bidding into Sweden for the first time it is worth it for a further reason: what counts as a complete answer here is a matter of practice as much as of the wording, and that practice is what we read against.
We are the last guarantor: the one who makes sure the tender is not rejected on unnecessary errors, and who can raise the quality of the answers where there is room.
Have a tender coming up? Get in touch in good time before the deadline.