Price is 40% of the score. It decided 80% of the outcome.

Weighted tender scoring rarely behaves the way the weightings suggest, and the arithmetic that actually decides awards sits somewhere most bidders never look.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for Price is 40% of the score. It decided 80% of the outcome.

A bid goes in at what the team believes is a fair price. It loses. The debrief says price. So the next bid goes in 8% lower, on a tender where the published criteria weighted quality at 60% and price at 40%. That 8% came almost entirely out of margin, and it bought, if the price formula was the common lowest-bid ratio, perhaps three points on a hundred-point scale. The mistake is not the discount. It is reading a weighting as if it were a probability. A weighting tells you…

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