Friday deadline, Monday start
A council has published a tender for on-street and car park charging. A business park wants workplace chargers for several tenants. A fleet operator is asking for depot charging. Each has a portal, a question set and a deadline. The operations director, the only one who can write the technical answers, spends the week at a laptop instead of running jobs.
Most questions have been answered before: your approach to site surveys, how you handle network operator applications, your maintenance offer, your health and safety arrangements, your accreditations. The answers are in last year's submissions, in several versions, and nobody is sure which one was the one that scored well.
Same questions, different wording
Tender writing is slow not because the questions are new, but because nothing makes old answers reusable. They sit in Word files named after the tender, mixed with project specifics. Accreditation certificates and insurance documents expire and get replaced in someone's downloads folder.
- Past answers are scattered across submission folders.
- Nobody records which answers scored well and which did not.
- Certificates, policies and CVs are out of date when needed.
- Word limits force rewriting from scratch each time.
- Case evidence is described from memory, which is risky.
What the time costs
Each tender takes senior people away from delivery. Some tenders are skipped because nobody has the time, including ones you could have won. Rushed answers are weaker than they should be. And the risk of an old certificate or a vague claim going into a submission rises every time the process is run under pressure.
Public sector and larger workplace tenders also score on evidence: current insurance, accreditations, policies and method statements that match what you actually do. An answer copied from a tender two years old may describe a back-office platform you no longer use or a maintenance offer you have since changed.
The tender library and drafter
- We gather your past submissions and split them into individual approved answers, tagged by topic: surveys, network operator applications, installation method, commissioning, back-office platform, maintenance, health and safety, environmental, social value.
- Accreditations, insurance, policies and team CVs go into a document store with expiry dates, and the right person is reminded before anything lapses.
- When a new tender arrives, its questions are extracted from the documents or portal export into a response sheet.
- For each question, the drafter (using OpenAI or Anthropic Claude over your library only) proposes the closest approved answer, adapted to the word limit, and shows which source it came from.
- Your team edits, checks and approves each answer. Anything that would need a new claim is flagged for a person to write, rather than invented.
- After the result, you record the scores or feedback per answer, so the library learns which answers to prefer.
| Task | Now | With the library |
|---|---|---|
| Finding a past answer | Searching old folders | Tagged and searchable |
| Fitting word limits | Rewrite by hand | Draft trimmed to the limit |
| Current certificates | Hunt through downloads | Store with expiry reminders |
| New claims | Written under pressure | Flagged for a person to write |
| Learning from results | Rarely | Scores recorded per answer |
Tenders without losing the director
A first draft of most answers exists within a day of downloading the tender, and your senior people spend their time on the questions that are genuinely new. Documents are current. Every answer can be traced to an approved source. Over several tenders, your best answers rise to the top, and your team can bid for work they used to let pass.
Is this how tenders go for you?
- One or two people write every tender, and delivery suffers.
- You have skipped tenders for lack of time.
- Past answers exist in several versions and nobody knows the best.
- Certificates have expired without anyone noticing until a submission.
- You do not record feedback against individual answers.