A tender document of several hundred pages can be expensive and resource-intensive for a smaller contractor with a tight budget and few employees. That is why the Roads Directorate prepared a new model for preparing tender documents for smaller tasks last year. And this has resulted in several smaller companies bidding on tenders that were previously only on the radar of the big players in the industry.
Wants even more small companies
– We have been running with the new model for a year and a half and have already managed to bring 25 suppliers on board. Many of them are small contractors that we have not heard from before. This is a positive development, but we would like to involve even more people. This is because we occasionally experience a tender where there is only one supplier who bids. And then it’s time-consuming if the construction budget doesn’t last, and we have to start over with a new tender, says area manager Ulla Konnerup from the Danish Road Directorate.
Has to make sense financially
– It is not unusual for a public tender to be several hundred pages long. It makes a difference to a smaller company like ours that we now only have to deal with half or a quarter of it. You have to remember that we always have to consider whether it is even worth it for us to spend time submitting offers, and the conclusion has often been that it is not. Now that we have to deal with fewer pages, we will be more inclined to give it a shot – and so far, it has worked out a few times, says director Michael A. Andersen from the contracting company Brdr. Andersen in Randers, which has almost 50 employees.
Among Denmark’s largest tender providers
The Danish Road Directorate is one of Denmark’s most significant construction and civil engineering project providers. And every year, they offer somewhere between 100 and 200 tenders on public construction projects.
Right now, contractors and other companies can find a large number of projects on the tender portal, which they will be able to bid on over the late summer and autumn.
