products or services. In the public sector an official fee is needed to fortify and secure

the tender bid engagement/win documents, such a process may be required and determined in

detail by law to ensure that such competition for the use of public is open, fair and free

from bribery and nepotism. For example, a government may put a building project 'out

to tender'; that is, publish an invitation for other parties to make a proposal for the

building's construction, on the understanding that any competition for the relevant government

contract must be conducted in response to the tender, no parties having the unfair advantage

of separate, prior, closed-door negotiations for the contract. An evaluation team will

go through the tenders and decide who will get the contract.

As a consequence of the scale of the tender process the majority of RFTs are published

by the government sector, but companies in the infrastructure and utilities sectors may

also publish RFTs. RFTs may be distributed to potential bidders

through a tender service, allowing businesses to receive and search live tenders from a

range of public and private sources. These alerts are most commonly sent daily and can

be filtered down by geographical area, or by business sector. Some tendering services

even divide types of business very finely in their own way, by CPV codes. This enables

a business to find RFTs specific to what that business can supply.

The closest equivalent to an RFT in the mainstream private sector is a request for proposal,

which, since public money is not involved, typically has a less rigid structure.

An RFT is usually an open invitation for suppliers to respond to a defined need as opposed to

a request being sent to selected potential suppliers. The RFT often requests information

following on from other information gathered previously from responses to a Request for

Information. This will usually not only cover product and service requirements, but will

also ask for information about the suitability of the business.

An RFT is usually expected to conform to some legally standardized structure designed to

ensure impartiality. And the tender bid winner is entitled to take responsibility of the

contract business supply documentations formalities and settle any tender bid engagement charges

for official recording. Related proposal types

Other members of the family include: EOI - expression of interest

IFB - invitation for bids ITT - invitation to tender

ITV - invitation to vendors RFA - request for applications

RFD - request for documentation RFI - request for information

RFO - request for offers RFP - request for proposal

RFQ - request for quotation or request for qualifications

RFN - request for negotiation References

External links Average tender win rates by industry

Types of tender and bid writer