Building Contractors Strategies in Attaining Bids in Tanzania

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