If you bid for public contracts in Ireland or the EU, almost everything you write is marked under one framework: MEAT — the Most Economically Advantageous Tender. Understand what MEAT actually rewards and you understand why some bids win on more than price....
The fastest way to understand how your bid will be marked is to see the instrument that marks it. A scoring matrix is no more than a structured way of turning a written answer into a number — but most suppliers never look at one closely, and so they write blind. This...
Most bids don’t lose because they’re weak. They lose because they leak marks — a point here, two points there — across answers that everyone on the team thought were fine. The losses are quiet, predictable, and almost always fixable before submission, if you know what...
Most suppliers picture tender evaluation as a careful, generous read — an expert sitting with your response, weighing its merits, appreciating the work. That picture is comforting, and it is almost entirely wrong. It leads teams to write for a reader who does not...
Social value in tenders is now a standard component of public sector procurement – but how it counts depends heavily on where you’re bidding. In the UK it’s usually a weighted, scored award criterion worth 10–20% of the quality marks. In Ireland it’s more often...
