Go/no-go decision for tenders: a scorecard for Indian bids

What is a go/no-go decision in a tender?

Go/no-go and bid/no-bid mean the same thing: before your team spends real effort on a response, someone decides whether this tender is worth winning and whether you can win it. In Indian public tenders the cost of getting this wrong is not only the bid team's time. EMD gets blocked, engineers stop estimating live orders, and a won tender with bad terms can hurt more than a lost one.

Most teams already make this call. The trouble is that they make it by mood. The sales head likes the buyer, the tender looks big, and three weeks later someone notices the turnover criterion. A startup advice site puts it bluntly: "Chasing a tender you're structurally ineligible for is the most common wasted month in govt sales." A written scorecard is the cheapest fix for that.

When should you make the bid/no-bid decision?

Use two gates. Each one has a different job.

1. Gate 1, within two working days of downloading the tender: run the knock-out checks and a rough score. Most tenders should die here, cheaply.
2. Gate 2, after the pre-bid replies and any corrigendum: score again with the final terms. Replies often change payment terms, liquidated damages or the delivery period, and that can flip a decision either way.

Between the gates, only the work needed to answer open questions should start: pre-bid queries, a rough cost estimate, a call to the OEM for authorization. Full estimation and document preparation wait for gate 2.

Knock-out criteria: the checks that end the discussion

A knock-out is a condition you cannot meet before the bid due date. If one applies, the answer is no-bid regardless of how attractive the rest looks. Read these clauses first.

Two cautions. First, check relaxations before you call something a knock-out: central buyers may relax prior turnover and prior experience for micro and small enterprises, subject to quality and technical specifications, and startups recognised by DPIIT get similar relaxations. Second, read the definitions. "Similar work" and "completed" are often narrower than the sales team assumes. Our guides to pre-qualification criteria, Make in India local suppliers and the land border clause cover each check in detail.

A bid/no-bid matrix you can copy

If the tender clears the knock-outs, score it on seven criteria. Each criterion gets a score from 1 to 5, multiplied by its weight. Add the products and divide by 5, and you have a score out of 100. The weights below suit most manufacturers and contractors bidding for public sector work; change them once and then keep them stable, or the scores stop being comparable.

Score each criterion against evidence, not hope. Price position should come from award results for similar tenders, not from what the buyer paid five years ago. Commercial risk should come from the actual clauses: read the liquidated damages clause and the payment terms before you score, and look for the clauses that hide in annexures.

Go/no-go thresholds: what score is enough?

• 70 or more: go. Start full preparation after gate 2 confirms the terms.
• 50 to 69: conditional. Name the condition in writing, such as "bid if the pre-bid reply caps LD at 10 percent", and decide again when the answer arrives.
• Below 50: no-bid. Record the reasons and move on.

Totals can hide a fatal weakness, so add one override: any criterion scored 1 triggers a discussion with the approver, whatever the total. A construction publisher in the US suggests a similar red-flag rule: three or more red flags means no-bid, and one or two means a conversation about whether the risk can be reduced or the profit justifies it.

Illustrative example: a transformer maker and an EPC contractor score their tenders

A Vadodara maker of distribution transformers looks at a state power distribution company's tender for 120 units of 250 kVA, worth about ₹5.4 crore. It holds the BIS licence, its type test reports are within the required validity, and its turnover clears the PQ figure. A Pune EPC contractor looks at a ₹186 crore water treatment plant and pipeline package from a municipal corporation. It meets the similar-work and bid capacity criteria. Both tenders pass the knock-outs, so both get scored.

The transformer maker sets its condition as "bid if the payment cost is priced in". It adds the cost of carrying 90 days of receivables to its price, raises a pre-bid query asking for milestone payment, and bids. The EPC contractor's condition is sharper: "bid only if the pre-bid reply adds a price variation clause". The reply declines. With a score of 1 still sitting on commercial risk, the director calls no-bid, and the reasons go on record for the next tender from this corporation.

Notice what the scorecard did. Neither decision was obvious from the tender value or the buyer's name. Both came from writing down a condition and checking it against a real answer. For EPC teams, our EPC industry page shows how package-level reviews fit together.

Who should make the go/no-go call?

One person owns the scorecard; several people feed it; one person signs. A workable split for a mid-sized manufacturer or contractor looks like this:

• Bid manager: runs the knock-out checks, collects the scores, keeps the record and chases the open questions.
• Sales or business development: fit, customer history and what is known about competitors.
• Engineering or estimation: technical compliance, deviations and a rough cost.
• Finance: EMD, performance security, payment terms and the working capital the order will lock up.
• Production or projects: whether the shop or site team can deliver in the delivery window.
• Legal, for large or EPC contracts: liability, indemnity and LD wording.
• Approver: set by value bands. For example, a business head up to ₹2 crore and a director above it. Pick bands that suit your size.

Scoring together in one 30-minute meeting works better than collecting scores by email, because the disagreements are the useful part. When engineering scores compliance at 2 and sales scores fit at 5, that conversation is the decision.

How AI tools help with go/no-go decisions, and what your team decides

Most of the time in a go/no-go review goes into finding the evidence: the PQ clause on page 14, the LD clause in an annexure, the last three award prices. TenderGenie's Risk & Compliance compares TQ/PQ criteria with your organization's credentials and documents, maps obligations to their source clauses and flags risks by category, each with its impact and a recommended action. Competitor Intelligence adds award history and frequent bidders, and lessons recorded on earlier tenders for the same customer sit in Enterprise Memory.

The scores, the thresholds and the final call stay with your people. If you want to see how the evidence and the recorded decision come together in one tender workspace, the next step is our bid/no-bid decisions use case for TenderGenie.

Questions and answers