Abstract:
Contractors adopt various bidding strategies in order to win the tender. The strategies
adopted by the contractors are plans, ploy, patterns, perspective, or position base on
various managerial intentions that act as a support for decision making, as a vehicle
for coordination and as a target to win the given tender.
Some contractors have one or no works for the whole year regardless of many public
or private bids applied. These contractors use different strategies in biding but you
find some get many works and others do not win or win very few works compared to
the big number of tender participated.
The aim of this study was to assess contribution of bidding strategies in achievement
of successful bid by Tanzania building contractors. This has been achieved through
identification of bidding strategies used, assessment of factors considered in the choice
of suitable ones and their contribution to the successful bid.
To attain the aim of this study qualitative approach through individual interview of 10
contractors obtained by judgmental sampling. Also quantitative research approach has
been deployed to data collated through questionnaires survey conducted to 60 local
building contractors obtained through stratified sampling techniques from CRB list of
class I-III contractors residing at Dar es Salaam.
Microsoft excel and Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to
analyze data collected using questionnaire and content analysis method was used to
analyzed data collected using interviews.
The study found that sustainable practice and aggressive/random tendering are the
most used strategies and they appear to have a strong/high contribution to successful
bid compared to others. On the other hand, add no price features and public
relation/social responsibility were less common used strategies and appear to have
small contribution in attaining successful bids.
The study suggests that local building contractors should make use of bidding
strategies as their milestone to improve from less price or market followers’
contractors to innovator contractor with successful biding practice