The Annual Re-Bid and How to Be Ready for It
Why this matters
The solicitation lands with three weeks to respond, and shops spend those three weeks writing. That is the wrong three weeks. By the time the invitation goes out, most of what will decide the award already exists inside the institution's own records: response times their software timestamped, tickets closed with fields left blank, invoices their accounts payable had to send back. You cannot write your way out of a file you spent twelve months producing.
So treat the re-bid as an artifact you fill in continuously and hand over at the end, rather than a document you compose under deadline. This card is that artifact: seven fields, where each number comes from, and one term's worth of real values filled into it.
A sibling card covers why a re-bid gets triggered in the first place and what holds work in place between cycles. That ground is not repeated here. This one is only about the evidence.
The score is computed before the solicitation exists
Institutional evaluation committees score against a rubric, and the technical or past-performance portion of that rubric is filled from the institution's own data, not from your narrative. A committee member opens the CMMS, runs a vendor report, and reads what comes out.
The consequence that shops underestimate: a blank field is scored, and it is not scored as missing data. A work order closed with no completion notes, no parts listed and no arrival timestamp reads to an evaluator exactly like a job that was not done well, because the alternative interpretation, that it was done well and recorded badly, requires them to give you the benefit of a doubt they have no reason to extend to a vendor they are re-competing.
That is the entire argument for keeping this sheet. Not because a facilities director asks for it, but because you need to know what their report says before they run it.
Seven fields, and where each number comes from
Response time against the stated standard. Not average response, which nobody scores. Count of tickets that met the contract's stated window, over count of tickets in that priority. Comes from their CMMS; your own dispatch log will disagree, and the section below explains why.
First-visit completion rate. Tickets closed on the first visit, over total tickets. This is the number a facilities director feels, because every second visit costs them an escort, a room release and a call from the requester.
Return visits within 30 days. Tickets on the same asset, same fault, inside 30 days of a closed ticket. Your rework rate as the customer sees it.
Closeout completeness. Tickets accepted with all required fields on first submission, over total tickets. Pure record hygiene, entirely inside your control, and the one most shops have never measured.
Invoice first-pass acceptance. Invoices paid without being returned for correction, over invoices submitted. Lives on your side; their accounts payable knows the number but will not volunteer it.
Compliance currency. Not a rate. A date list: certificate of insurance expiry, badge expiry per technician, site orientation dates, and any licence or certification the contract names. Anything expired on the day of evaluation is a scored deficiency regardless of when you renewed it.
The deferred-work register. Findings you reported that were not funded, with the date reported and the current status. This one is not a performance metric at all, and it is the field that most often wins the re-bid, because it is evidence you were doing the customer's thinking for them across the whole term.
Two numbers your customer computes and you cannot see
Their response clock starts earlier than yours. Your clock starts when the ticket reaches you. Theirs commonly starts when the requester submitted it, which includes however long it sat in their own queue before dispatch. Every institutional shop that has compared the two has found the same direction of error: their number is worse than yours, sometimes badly.
Their satisfaction data comes from the requester, not from facilities. Many CMMS platforms send a short survey to whoever opened the ticket, which is a teacher, a nurse or a lab manager, not the person you talk to. That respondent is rating whether their room got fixed and whether your technician was pleasant in a space full of people, and they have no idea what was in scope.
The sheet, filled in: one district, one term
Twelve months, one school district, 186 work orders. The contract states a 4-hour response window for Priority 1 and 2 business days for Priority 3.
| Field | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Response, Priority 1 | 20 of 22 met, about 91% by our clock | Our dispatch log |
| Response, Priority 1, their clock | 14 of 22 met, about 64% | District CMMS |
| Response, Priority 3 | 157 of 164 met, about 96% | District CMMS |
| First-visit completion | 138 of 186, about 74% | District CMMS |
| Returns within 30 days | 11 of 186, about 6% | District CMMS |
| Closeout completeness | 172 of 186 accepted first submission, about 92% | District CMMS |
| Invoice first-pass acceptance | 87 of 96, about 91% | Our accounts receivable |
| Compliance currency | Certificate current to March; 6 of 7 badges current, one lapsed in month 9; orientation current for all 7 | Our file |
| Deferred register | 7 items reported and unfunded, 3 open more than two quarters | Our file, cross-referenced to their tickets |
The Priority 1 split is the finding. By our dispatch-to-arrival clock we averaged 2.6 hours and met the standard on 20 of 22. Their tickets sat an average of 2.5 hours in their own queue before release, so their created-to-arrival average is 5.1 hours and only 14 of 22 met a 4-hour standard. Both numbers are correct. Only one of them is in the file the committee reads.
Note what that does to any comparison. Benchmarking our 91% against a competitor's or a prior year's figure taken from their CMMS compares a corrected number against an uncorrected one, which flatters us by the whole queue time. Compared like for like, on their clock, the honest figure is about 64%.
Reading it: what to fix first, and by how much
The rule: on a site quarter containing at least 40 tickets, act on first-visit completion when it is below 80% AND the 30-day return rate is above 5%. Both, not either. A low first-visit rate on its own frequently means second visits that were planned, a part on order or a room that was not available, which is not a defect. Paired with returns above 5%, it means the first visit was not finishing the job.
Run the example through it. The site averaged 46 tickets a quarter, above the 40 floor. First-visit completion is about 74%, below 80%. Returns are about 6%, above 5%. Both conditions hold, so it is actionable.
The correction, and its size: pull the 11 return tickets and list the parts that closed them. Add to truck stock only the parts appearing in 3 or more of the 11, one of each per truck. Not a stock expansion, one step. Here that was three items, and they accounted for 7 of the 11 returns.
Now the honest arithmetic on the gain. Carrying those parts would have converted at most those 7 returns to first-visit completions, taking first-visit completion from 138 of 186 to 145 of 186, about 78%. That is still under the 80% gate. The stock change was worth making and it does not by itself clear the threshold, which tells you the remaining gap is diagnostic rather than logistical: the other 4 returns came back because the first diagnosis was incomplete, and no van inventory fixes that.
Second priority is the response-clock gap, because it is the largest single scored deficiency on the sheet and it is not a performance problem at all. The fix is a conversation with the CMMS administrator about when a ticket is released to the vendor, and if the queue time will not move, it is a negotiation to have the contract's response window measured from dispatch, stated in the agreement.
Third is the lapsed badge, which cost nothing operationally and is a scored deficiency on the day it is read.
What the three-week response window is actually for
The file is pre-built, so the response window is not for assembling evidence. It is for the two failure modes that no amount of performance can survive, and both of them are procedural.
Responsiveness. Public procurement separates responsiveness from evaluation, and it does it first. A bid missing a required form, a signature, an acknowledgment of an addendum, or a bond where one is required is commonly set aside as non-responsive and never scored at all. Your performance file is not read, because your submission never reached the committee. The defence is mechanical: build the submission against the solicitation's own checklist page, in the order it lists them, and treat every addendum as a document requiring a signed acknowledgment even when it changes nothing you care about.
Mandatory attendance. Many institutional solicitations carry a mandatory pre-bid conference or site walk, and mandatory there is literal. An incumbent who has worked the buildings for three years and skips the walk because they know the buildings can be disqualified by the sign-in sheet. Send someone, sign the sheet, and keep a copy of it.
The useful reframe is that the response window tests whether you can follow their process, which is a live audition for exactly the thing the contract will require of you every week. Committees know that, and they treat a sloppy submission as a forecast rather than as an oversight.
The one substantive thing worth writing during the window is the deferred-work register, turned outward. Not as a sales list, but as a plain statement of what you found, when you reported it, and what it is still doing. That is the only part of your submission a competitor cannot write, because they were not there.
What the sheet cannot see
Three things decide re-bids and none of them appear in any field above.
Incumbency can run against you. A new facilities director frequently re-bids specifically to find out what the market charges, and the incumbent's role in that exercise is to be the benchmark. You can be scored well and still be the number everyone else is asked to beat.
Relationship equity dies with a person. The supervisor who knows you kept a boiler alive through a bad winter carries none of that into the file when he retires in month 8. The deferred-work register is the only part of that history that survives him, which is the argument for maintaining it in writing rather than in a relationship.
Price is often weighted at a fixed share regardless of your evidence. Public procurement rubrics commonly publish the weighting in the solicitation itself, and where price carries the larger share, a perfect performance file cannot outrun a substantial price gap. Read the weighting before deciding how much of your response effort goes into narrative, because that ratio is printed and most shops never look at it.
References
- See related: Why Property Work Goes Out to Bid and What Holds It, How an Institution Decides to Spend Money, The Facilities Director and What They Are Actually Judged On
- See related: Reading a Request for Proposal Before You Spend Time Bidding, How to Assemble a Closeout Package
- Trade-standard practice for computerized maintenance management system reporting and vendor performance measurement