This lecture addresses the question: what is a tender?  We look at the basic structure of a tender, how it could be scored and what kinds of things buyers ask from suppliers when they run a tendering process.

Now that we understand what a tender is, we will take a look in a little more detail at the two main types of tendering process used by public sector buyers: open tendering and restricted tendering. This lecture covers the main differences in the two procedures, when they might be used and what to expect to see during each. We will also cover OJEU tendering, what it means and the legal thresholds when OJEU tendering applies, along with the minimum timescales you will have to write your bid.

This lecture looks at the main structure of a typical tender, exploring the documents you may come across and what each of them are for, and a typical tender timetable for you to get a better understanding of the time and effort needed to compete for a public sector tender.

This lecture covers the most common types of pass/fail criteria that you will come across in the tenders you encounter. Remember, unlike scored questions, it is essential that these criteria are met in order for your bid to be deemed 'compliant'. Failure to meet these criteria will often lead to your bid being rejected, so take note of these when exploring your tender opportunities.

Quality criteria typically makes up a large proportion of most tenders, often being weighted as much, if not more than pricing. This lecture looks at the main types of questions that could be asked of you and how these quality questions will be scored by your buyer.

This lecture goes into the pricing component that you'll find in most, if not all tenders you will come across. We cover the main scoring mechanism, how your price will be converted into a pricing score and show you worked examples of different types of price scoring models. We also give some tips on how to prepare your pricing and where to look to benchmark against other, similar contracts.

In the final lecture in this series, we summarise everything we've learned so far, recapping some of the main concepts and taking a final look at the take away messages within each of the lectures.