Do you work on a lot of bids simultaneously? Do you need a simple way to keep track of the status of bids with your team, both before and after they've been submitted?
Putting together a competitive bid is a time consuming process, that can often involve numerous people with different areas of expertise and multiple steps to the process before even getting to sign an actual contract. This is where a dedicated bid workspace comes in handy. It gives you one place to keep track of old and new bids with your team, so everyone involved can easily stay up to date on the status and needs of every bid.
What are bid spaces?
Tendium offers different tools to manage the bidding process from end to end. Our customisable tender monitoring profiles are the first step to help you find opportunities worth pursuing in the public market. Once these start pouring in, searching through tender documents and using the qualification tools built into your monitoring feed can help quickly trim down the list to only the most promising tenders.
Once you've screened a tender and determined it's an opportunity worth pursuing, it's time to kick off the bidding process. To do this, you can mark a tender as "Interesting" to advance it through your pipeline - this is where bid spaces coming in. Qualifying a tender will prompt you to save it to one of your bid spaces, which can then be used to keep track of the tender throughout the bidding process.
A bid space gives you a Kanban board or table view of all the tenders you've saved to it, with different columns to keep track of each bid's status. You can set up multiple bid spaces for different purposes, such as for tenders of a specific product, geography or team involved. Each bid space can be shared with different team members, giving you a high level of flexibility in how you coordinate bidding and control access with different stakeholders.
With this in mind, a bid space generally has two main areas of use:
To provide an overview of where current bids are in the tendering process
To track the outcomes of submitted bids
Create a new bid space
You can create as many bid spaces as you need to organise different bids, call offs and framework agreements. It's up to you how you structure your bid spaces - whether it's by tender type, geography, or which team will be working on them, any system can be used according to your workflow needs.
To create a new bid space, from the left sidebar under BIDSPACES, click + Add new.
Give your bid space a Name.
Choose who will be a bid space owner. To add specific teammates as an owner, select their name from the dropdown Owners list and click Add.Alternatively, click the toggle to Set everybody in the company as owner.
If you have not made everyone in your company a bid space owner, you can also choose who will have access to the bid space. By default, the Give all teammates access to this bidspace setting will be enabled. Click the toggle to disable it.To give specific teammates access, select their name from the dropdown Have access list and click Add.
Owners have full access to the bid space and can manage users of the bid space (including adding other owners).
Access only users can manage tenders in a bid space (change their status, comment, etc.) and remove themselves from a bid space.
Save a tender to a bid space
Depending on where you are viewing a tender, there are a few different ways you can add it to a bid space.
From your tender monitoring feed, you can mark any tender as interesting and add it to a bid space by clicking the green + icon and selecting a bid space from the drop down list.
Alternatively, you can click a tender to preview it.
Then from the right sidebar, click Interesting and select a bid space from the dropdown list.
You may also click and drag a tender from the tender feed to a bid space in the left side bar.
From a tender summary, you can also save a tender to a bid space by clicking the green + icon and selecting a bid space from the dropdown list.
Change views and switch between bid spaces
You have the option of viewing each of your bid spaces in either board or table view, depending on your preferred format.
Change bid space view
To switch the view type, click the filter symbol, and then click either Table or Kanban respectively.
Note that the same information will be displayed in either view, but the location of the tender status and bid space sorting options will change.
Switch between bid spaces
All the bid spaces you are the owner of or have access to will be listed in the left sidebar. To switch between bid spaces, simply click the bid space name under BIDSPACES in the left sidebar:
Search and sort your bid space
All the tenders in your bid space can be searched and sorted by its status or any of its information fields, such as buyer, deadline, or whether it is a framework agreement.
To sort your bid space, first switch to table view. Then, click the arrows next to a column's name to sort the table by that field in ascending or descending order.
Note: Only one field can be used to sort at a time.
If you'd like to quickly locate a tender, you can do so using the search field at the top of your bid space. Type a word and your table or board will automatically filter to only show tenders where that keyword occurs in the tender title or description.
Edit a bid space
Any owner can edit a bid space to change its name, icon color, or manage who has access to it.
In the left sidebar, select the bid space you'd like to edit
In the upper right hand corner, click Edit bidspace.
Change the name and click Save.
Under Color, click the edit icon to change the color of the bid space icon.
Add any users you'd like to set as bid space Owner or Have access and click Add.
Archive or delete a bid space
If you've retired a product, project or reorganised your company, you may no longer need some of your bid spaces. If this is the case, you can either archive or delete any unnecessary bid spaces you no longer need.
Before proceeding, bear in mind that archived bid spaces can be restored, but deleted bid spaces cannot. So if in doubt, we recommend archiving a bid space before deleting to ensure you don't lose any important information!
From the left sidebar, select the bid space you'd like to archive or delete.
Click the three horisontal dots in the upper right corner, and then click Archive bidspace or Delete bidspace.
Click Archive to confirm you'd like to archive the bid space. A similar confirmation prompt will appear if you choose to Delete instead.
Note: An archived bid space can be restored, but a deleted bid space cannot. Please be sure you will not need to access a bid space or any information on it before deleting.
Once archived, you will see a red banner at the top of your screen
Manage and restore archived bid spaces
If you have previously archived a bid space that you'd now like to use, it just takes a few clicks to restore it! 🙂
From the left sidebar, click the three horisonal dots next to BIDSPACES and select ARCHIVED BIDSPACES.
From here you can view, restore, or delete any archived bid spaces. Click View to view the archived bid space.
From here you can edit the bid space or change the status of any tenders saved to it. Click the three horisontal dots in the upper right corner to Restore or Delete it.
Alternatively, in the main Archived bidspaces area, click the trash bin icon to delete a bid space, then click Delete to confirm.
Or click Restore to fully restore the bid space.
FAQ
Have you been invited by a colleague?
If so, there's a good chance that a bid space may have already been set up for your team. If someone on your team has a bid space you have not yet been invited to, it will not show up in your sidebar, so check with your account admin to make sure you've been invited to those that are relevant.
What does it mean if a bid space is archived?
You will still be able to access it and change the status of bids saved to it, but you will no longer see the bid space in your left sidebar or be able to add new bids to it.
Can a tender be saved to more than one bid space?
No. Once a tender has been saved to a bid space, it can easily be moved to another one by selecting or dragging and dropping the tender into the other bid space. The same tender, however, cannot be stored in more than one bid space simultaneously.
Can I customise the status (column) names of my bid space?
Not yet, but this highly requested feature is coming soon! 🤗
What happens after I save a tender to a bid space?
Once a tender has been saved, you can keep track of its progress through your qualification or sales pipeline by updating the tender status.
