Are you a contractor or a supplier who receives many invitations to bid in different industries? Is the bidding process time consuming for you?
Look no further! Embrace automation with Parseur and save time. You'll be able to focus on creating better proposals and winning bids.
What is an invitation to bid?
An invitation to bid (also known as an ITB) is a call to contractors to submit their proposals for a specific project. All interested bidders are provided with the details, timelines, specifications, and submission process.
ITB is used when the client already knows what he wants in terms of project outcomes. The contractor doesn't offer additional solutions or propose new concepts. The vendor already knows what is expected of him.
Most ITBs are for fixed-term contracts and have a well-defined scope.
Steps of an invitation to bid
The bidding process involves five steps:
- Bid appeal
- Bid submission
- Bid selection
- Subcontracting
- Contract formation
Pain points contractors face in manual bid management and ITBs handling
The bidding process is competitive and requires time and patience from vendors.
Human errors
Since the market is competitive, as a contractor you are under pressure to submit bids quickly. And, in that process you may misinterpret or overlook information leading to bidding errors.
Time consuming
From the time you file a bid appeal until you receive a contract from the client, the process takes time and may discourage you from submitting a bid.
Volume management
Contractors may receive a high volume of ITBs, particularly if they operate in a busy or competitive market. Manually managing this influx of bids can be overwhelming and result in missed opportunities.
Automating bid management with Parseur
As a PDF OCR , Parseur helps streamline the bid management process for contractors. The email is user-friendly and automates data extraction from bid invitation emails or PDFs.
You can save countless hours of [manual data entry]/blog/manual-data-entry) and, Parseur can process large volumes of text within seconds.
Why should you use Parseur to automate the bidding process?
As a vendor, you may be receiving countless emails with an invitation to bid on a daily basis, especially if you are using a marketplace such as BuildingConnected.
Going through those emails and choosing the ones that you want to bid on is tedious.
- Efficiency: Parseur reduces time spent on processing ITBs.
- Accuracy: Parseur's automation reduces human error as the email parsing software has a high degree of accuracy.
- Scalability: As your business grows, you will receive more ITBs and Parseur's ability to handle an increasing number of ITBs is exceptional.
I am a contractor who doesn't have technical skills. Can I use Parseur?
Definitely! There is no learning curve with Parseur as it is a no-code tool.
View all of Parseur features here.
I am a supplier but I cannot invest a huge amount of money in bid management software. How is Parseur cost-effective?
To start with, Parseur offers a free plan where you have access to all the features for a number of emails. After that, you'll move to a pay as you grow plan.
Parseur is up to [three times less expensive]/best-email-parser) than other tools.
How to automate the bid management process?
Once you've signed up for Parseur, create a custom mailbox to receive the emails.
Step 1: Create an ITB mailbox
You'll receive a custom email address for that mailbox. Forward one of your ITB emails to that mailbox.
To automate this manual forwarding process, you can create an auto-forwarding rule from your personal inbox to the Parseur mailbox.
Step 2: Create a template for the ITB email
Creating a custom template enables you to train Parseur by choosing the [text that you want to extract]/blog/text-extraction).
Create a text box for those data and create data fields for them.
Step 3: Verify the data parsed from invitation to bid emails
You'll notice that Parseur can extract metadata from emails and documents, and [addresses are normalized]/use-case/parse-normalize-geolocate-address-parseur)
Each time this mailbox receives an email, it will be processed automatically.
What can you do with this data?
- Export it to [Google Sheets]/integration/emails-to-google-sheets) using Parseur's default formula
- Send it to another application via Parseur's native integrations (Zapier, Make, Power Automate)
Integrating automation in the bidding process
Adopting automation with Parseur could give contractors the edge they need to win more bids and increase their productivity.
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