Friday, December 19, 2014

Urgent Bids and Budgets; The Engineers that Stole Christmas!


What is up with all these bids and urgent budget price requests before Christmas??
Some engineers and owners may not realize that we have kids in Christmas choir concerts and plays and end of year parties also…. I am in trouble with the wife because I have a sick kid on the last day of school so she wants me to go to another kid’s break up party because she can’t, but I have a bid today, one Monday and one Tuesday next week (12/23) that I need to get pricing and proposals together for…. Why does someone want bids on 12/23? Are the engineers going to go through them between Christmas Eve and New Year ’s Day? I bloody hope they are after I have busted my butt to get these together and not had a chance to enjoy all the buildup to the holidays...

And to the engineers who say “well if you can’t get the budget price by 12/24, can you get it to us by 12/31…. Yeah great, there goes the few day’s off I was planning to have with the family after the hectic bidding up to Christmas Eve. And this does not take into account a few projects I decided not to bid because of such a high workload this time of year.
It certainly is a good sign for the economy and the industry all of this bidding happening at once and I prefer too many bids than none. I understand there may be some budgetary reasons for needing these projects bid before the end of the year. If the project must be bid by year’s end and you want to get quality bids, my recommendation is you bid it late November or early December. Otherwise you may end up getting a conservative estimate because OEMs don’t have time to properly cost the project (and we are at the same time hassling our suppliers for quotes who would have the same gripe as us being flooded at the end of the year) and maybe getting high bids will defeat the purpose of trying to push the project through by the end of the year!