Tender Compliance: What does it mean to be non-compliant?

Ensuring tender compliance is often one of the hidden, though important aspects of quality checking your tender before submission. Non-compliance in any business circumstance can be costly, meaning large fines or even criminal charges. In the world of tendering, non-compliance can be detrimental to your tendering efforts. Ultimately, submitting a non-compliant tender will result in it being rejected.

So, how can you avoid non-compliance? Keep reading to find out!

What does a non-compliant tender mean?

When the buyer delivers an Invitation to Tender (ITT) to the supplier (vendor), this will include specific requirements and rules for the supplier to follow when creating their tender submission.

Typically, the buyer’s requirements for compliance will involve two main things:

All specified, necessary information must be included. This means that you should:

• Answer all the questions set
• Submit the tender on time – stick to the deadline!

The tender must be formatted according to the buyer’s wishes. This means that you should:

• Submit in the correct format
• Not exceed the word length

Our Top Tips for Ensuring Compliance

Ensuring tender compliance often occurs far in advance of the actual tender writing process. A lot of planning is involved!

• As compliance includes the tender deadline for submission, it is vital that you have a solid bid plan in place so that you ensure you submit your tender before the deadline (always give yourself extra time for unexpected hurdles during the process!)
• Don’t dive straight into the tender! Make sure you read through the tender document several times and highlight areas of compliance to make sure you don’t miss anything!
• Check your compliance multiple times! Apart from the final compliance check before submission, it is wise to check your compliance many times during each stage of the writing process. If you leave it till the moment before submission, you will be rushed, and stressed and you may miss something!
• You need to be accurate, precise, and able to provide evidence! The buyer needs every assurance that you are the supplier for them. This means providing enough evidence in a clear and concise way with supporting documents. So be prepared to provide these necessary documents.

How we can help!

Ensuring tender compliance can be a stressful process and not all businesses have the time or resources to dedicate to necessary compliance checks. At Hudson, we can help you ensure you are ready for submission and even submit the tender on your behalf!

See our services below!

Tender Writing

Once you’ve found the perfect bid for your business, send it our way. Our Bid Writers can take care of the whole thing for you they’ll even submit it on your behalf. They’ll let you know what they need from you, providing you with a full Tender Writing breakdown.

Tender Ready

Our Tender Ready 4-week programme is perfect for businesses that have never tendered before. A Bid Writer will work with you to ensure you have everything in place to tender successfully. Tender Ready offers your business:

• A 12-month subscription to one Hudson Discover
• Access to Global Bid Directors and Senior Bidding Professionals.
• An Organisation-wide Bid library, including 3 case studies, 5 CVs and policies.
• Additional flexible benefits. 

Tender Improvement

If you’ve been tendering but aren’t seeing success from your current efforts, our Tender Improvement package can help. Our Bid Team will assess your previous responses and tender documents. They will work with you to improve for future submissions. This package includes a 12-month subscription to a Hudson Discover portal and additional tendering development services.

Tender Mentor

If you’ve written your tender response and need it double-checked for errors, Tender Mentor can help. A Bid Writer will proofread your work for any inconsistencies, grammar, or spelling mistakes. They will also ensure it’s in line with the specification before you submit it. This is a great way of improving your skills and understanding of how to polish your tender.

Contact us:

Contact us to find out how we can help your business SUCCEED!

Additional support:

Do you only require assistance with PQQs or SQs? We can help!

Submit the relevant information regarding the work you need, and we will provide a quote for the work agreed upon.

We provide support at all levels of the bid writing process, so if you simply need it proofread before you submit it, we can also help with that!

Discover Elite

Upgrading to Discover Elite can optimise your tendering efforts!

Our two new time-saving tools can improve competitor awareness and success rate when bidding for a contract:

The Ultimate Time Save Package (for those on the go!)

• Five tender breakdowns per month.
• Annual subscription to two sector-specific portals.
• Dedicated account manager.

The Become a Pre-Bid Master package

• All of the above.
• Seven tender breakdowns per month.
• Bid Strategy delivered by a Senior Bid Manager (minimum five years experience). Our Global Bid Director will manage the bid strategy.

Our other divisions:

Vocal

Wanting to impress a buyer? Our creative content agency Vocal is always on hand to help!

Our Vocal team are never afraid to be heard – we’re a loud bunch!

From micro-businesses to large organisations, we provide ways to make your business stand out from the crowd. We can transform your bid into a professionally designed tender document!

Vocal specialises in:

• Copywriting
• Marketing
• Branding
• Websites
• Design
• Illustration

Alpha

Our online virtual learning environment for Education, Enterprise and Home Learners is currently being used to power our platforms – Tender VLE and Procure VLE (Coming soon).

We believe in learning at your own pace, wherever you are!

Find more helpful tips and advice in our blogs. We cover topics including:

• How to win a tender
• What is a Bid Writer?
• Writing winning bids
• 7 tips for tendering for contracts
• Tips for bid management
• Bid writing services
• The types of tendering procedures
• Writing bids
• Bid Writing Consultants
• Submitting a tender response