Procurement Templates

What does ITT stand for

What does ITT stand for, Invitation to Tender, it is to invite a company to submit a proposal or bid.

An ITT is not designed to be legally binding, typically the client will include some wording in the instructions that allow them to terminate the process at any time and the cost associated with preparing the tender will be the responsibility of the supplier with no compensation.

If you come across a 2 stage process this is restricted tenders, restricted calls for tenders or invited tenders are only open to selected prequalified vendors or contractors. Typically the first stage is called an expression-of-interest, RFI PQQ or SQ

The reasons for restricted tenders differ in scope and purpose. Restricted tenders can come about because:

  • essentially only one suitable supplier of the services or product exists
  • of confidentiality issues (such as in military contracts)
  • of the need for expedience (as in emergency situations)
  • of a need to weed out tenderers who do not have the financial or technical capabilities to fulfil the requirements.

An ITT pack typically comprises of the following:

  • Cover letter or email
  • Tender Instructions
Specification

The ITT buyers guide will help you write the specification.  Most ITT’s follow the same format. The specification document is the key tender material to tell the supplier the statement of requirements or outcomes of the project.  Typically the client’s internal stakeholder/end users are required to write the specification if they use a service or product on a daily or frequent basis it should be easy for them to articulate their requirements. Your role as a buyer/procurement manager or commercial specialist is to review the initial draft version and refine it. Some stakeholders are quite good at writing specifications and some will struggle. Depending on your level of experience or whether if you are a category specialist there will be times when you may be asked to support with a tender where you might struggle with the specification or it might take you twice as long to critique and prepare. The benefit of using an ITT buyers guide is a prepared list of criteria that should be included in the specification. This allows you to do 3 things:

  1. Check whether if sufficent information is being provided to the markeplace
  2. Give you ammunition to critique the specification, if you have never bought X before you might not know what to look for in terms of risk or outcomes
  3. Speed, if you are being pulled in multiple directions or work with several clients you need to get results quickly with a quick turnaround, without compromising on quality.
  • Evaluation Criteria
  • Pricing schedule
  • Other Annexes relating to compliance.

Invtiation to Tender Guides in development:

  •  Consultancy Tender
  • Contingent Labour Tender
  • Couriers Tender
  • Data Storage
  • Document Storage
  • Employee Assistance
  • Employee Benefits
  • HR Payroll Tender
  • Insurance Tender”
  • Legal Services Tender
  • Market Research Tender
  • Mobile Device Management Tender
  • Media Buying Tender
  • Multi Functional Device Tender”
  • “Network (IT) Tender
  • Occupational Health Tender”
  • P2P Tender”
  • Print Tender
  • Stationery Tender”
  • Travel Tender
  • Unified Communications Tender

The series of buyers guide is used as a quick reference to help you create an invitation to tender. To keep the cost low, these should be used as cheat sheets helpful prompts. Note it is not a final version of an ITT, it is designed for the buyer to put together their own version of the Invitation to Tender designed for the specific project. It’s important to use your professional skills to finesse the final version otherwise the tender will be too generic and template driven.

You can use the  Invitation To Tender Buyers Guide in conjunction with other templates,  use the search function to get RFI, RFQ, RFP and ITT templates. Basic versions (but still good) are free. More in-depth versions can be bought as part of the A-Z premium template selection. Hopefully, you now have a better understanding for what does ITT stand for.

FAQ

Can I issue the buying guide as a specification without amendments?

I do not recommend that you issue an Invitation to Tender based on just the buying guide, this is supposed to be used as a prompt, it will have the cornerstone content but tailoring is essential to get the best outcome for your client

I want an ITT pack that’s 90% ready to be issued, why can’t I purchase a template with the whole ITT pack rather than buying documents separately?

The documents are designed to be flexible where you can mix and match, not everyone wants all the of the components in the ITT pack, if documents are sold as a single pack, based on the time it takes to write a tender this will be fairly expensive, the documents are available for download as single items to make it affordable and to achieve economies of scale. For example, an ITT pack for consultancy might take 2 weeks to write @£500 a day. 10 days of work =£5,000 excluding VAT.  However, by breaking up the documents they are sold at cheaper unit prices but sold at higher volume. Essentially, even if all templates are downloaded separately to form the ITT pack, the buyer is still getting a huge saving because the templates rely on economy of scale to achieve actual value.

To recap:

What does ITT stand for? ITT is an invitation to tender

Now that you know what does ITT stand for you might want to check out the ITT template