Boeing Co. has filed a formal protest over the process used by the United States Air Force in awarding a $35 billion tanker contract to Northrop Grumman Corp.  As a basis for the protest, Boeing alleges that Air Force officials altered contract requirements unfairly and did not compare bids on the same specifications.

Can the same claims be made about your bidding practices?  When was the last time you reviewed the process, or audited past contract awards?

Fair and even-handed bidding processes not only keep your organization away from illegal or unethical activities, it also ensures that your team will always have top quality vendors willing to do business with you.  Consider it from the vendor's perspective.  If a vendor's best effort, quality and price is being compared exactly to their competitors, losing a bid is acceptable (though not desired or enjoyed).  Losing a bid that is manipulated, though, will cause a vendor to bypass the process the next time around.

Without competitive bidding, your price will escalate with each successive bid, the quality will erode, and the service support will fade.  Without competing vendors willing to partner with your organization, you lose the inside track on hearing about their latest innovations, quality enhancements, and cost-saving ideas.

In practice, every bid usually comes back with extras and changes to the specifications.  As long as each of those extras can be fairly costed out and compared to every other bid, those extras can be considered.  If they cannot be fairly compared, the only choices are to ignore the extras or redesign the bid to include those items and conduct a rebid.

The fairness displayed in the bidding process is a true reflection of your organization, its values, and its culture.  What is the picture of your organization?