A tender due in ten days
A tender arrives for a guarding contract at a business park. The questionnaire has sixty questions: company details, insurance, accreditations, screening process, training, supervision, control room, lone worker arrangements, mobilisation plan, TUPE experience, environmental policy, social value, case studies, pricing schedule. The managing director and the operations director will write it between their normal jobs.
Most questions were answered in the last tender, and the one before. But which version was the good one? The screening answer was improved last time, but in a document on someone's laptop. The insurance certificate in the shared drive has expired. The accreditation certificate is the old one. The operations director spends an evening rewriting the mobilisation plan for the fourth time this year.
Why tenders are so repetitive and still slow
Guarding tenders ask similar questions in different wording, with different word limits. The answers exist, scattered across past submissions, with no record of which was scored well or which is current. Supporting documents expire and are updated without anyone replacing the old copies.
| Tender section | Where the answer lives now | The problem |
|---|---|---|
| Screening and vetting | Past submissions | Several versions, which is current? |
| Training and supervision | Past submissions | Rewritten to fit word limits each time |
| Insurance and accreditations | Shared drive | Expired certificates |
| Policies | Shared drive | Old versions mixed with new |
| Mobilisation plan | Someone's laptop | Written from scratch each time |
What the repetition costs
Senior people spend evenings on tender writing instead of running the business. Answers vary in quality from tender to tender. Expired documents are submitted by mistake, which can lose a bid outright. Some tenders are not bid for at all because nobody has the time. And lessons from feedback are lost, because the improved answer is not saved anywhere findable.
What you claim in a tender must be true and current, and your directors sign it off. We build the library and drafting; the content and the decisions are yours.
An answer library with a drafting tool
- Your past tender responses are gathered, and the best answers for each common topic are chosen by you and saved as approved answers, with a short and long version where useful.
- Supporting documents, such as insurance certificates, accreditations and policies, are held in one store with expiry and review dates, and the owner is reminded before they lapse.
- When a new tender arrives, the questionnaire is read and each question is matched to the most relevant approved answers and documents.
- A first draft is produced with those answers adapted to each question's wording and word limit, using an AI model such as Anthropic Claude, and marked clearly as a draft.
- Questions with no good match are listed for the bid writer to answer, and the new answer can be added to the library afterwards.
- Your bid writer edits and completes the response, and a director signs it off. Nothing is submitted by the tool.
- Feedback and scores from the buyer are recorded against the answers used, so the library improves over time.
- Expired documents are flagged before they go into a submission.
- Every answer in the library has an owner and a review date.
- Site-specific details, such as mobilisation dates, are always written fresh.
The next tender, with the library
The tender arrives. By the end of the day there is a draft response with approved answers adapted to each question, a list of eight questions that need fresh writing, and a flag that the insurance certificate expires before the contract start date. The directors spend their time on the site-specific parts, the pricing and the questions that make this bid different, rather than retyping the screening process. After the result, the scores go into the library.
Does your bid process look like this?
- Tender answers are copied from past submissions by hand.
- Nobody knows which version of an answer is best.
- Certificates in the shared drive are out of date.
- Some tenders are skipped for lack of time.
- Buyer feedback is not saved against the answers.