Procurement & commercial
Eight Red Flags Hiding in Electrical Tenders
The lowest bid told you its price. Did you hear what else it was telling you? Eight warning signs, each one a future dispute that is visible at tender if you know where to look.
Bid evaluation is the point where cost management stops being arithmetic and becomes forensics. The number on the front page is the least interesting thing in the submission. Here is what I actually read.
1. A wide spread between bidders
Three bids within five percent of each other describe a healthy market and a clear scope. A thirty percent spread means someone misread the documents, someone is buying the job, or the scope is genuinely ambiguous — and each of those demands a different response, before award rather than after.
2. One blended escalation rate
Copper, gear, conduit and specialist labour do not move together. A single percentage applied across all trades is fiction with a decimal point. Demand trade-level escalation logic — or price the gap yourself.
3. Bid validity shorter than your approval cycle
A thirty-day bid meeting a forty-five day governance process means you are repricing before you have awarded. Treat validity as a risk register item and budget the reprice.
4. "Lead times by others to confirm"
Transformer and switchgear deliveries set the critical path. A bid that shrugs at them has priced a different project than the one you intend to build. Make long-lead confirmation a condition of award.
5. Provisional sums breeding in Division 26
Every provisional sum is a postponed argument — scope that was not ready to bid, excluded from the "competitive" price. Count them before celebrating a low number, and forecast their outturn rather than reporting their placeholder.
A tender full of electrical provisional sums usually means the design was not ready to bid. The competitive price excludes exactly the scope most likely to grow.
6. Front-loaded payment schedules
Fat mobilization and early milestones are not generosity to the schedule — they are financing strategy at your cash flow's expense. Model the outturn under realistic quantity movement, not the tender total.
7. Aggressive exclusions on the qualifications page
The qualifications page is the real bid. A low number carrying sharp exclusions on gear lead-time risk is not low — it is a different, riskier deal wearing a smaller price tag. Price every exclusion back in before you compare totals.
8. Electrical suspiciously thin as a share of cost
When electrical looks light against the benchmark family, scope is usually hiding elsewhere — or missing entirely. Run the scope matrix.
An evaluation report should state not just which bid — but what residual risks the owner is accepting with it. Award decisions deserve that honesty.
Put this into practice
I built a free electrical cost toolkit around these principles — an elemental build-up with estimate-class ranges, a named risk register, compound escalation and a $/kW density check.
Open the free toolkit →