Some losses are more painful than others
By joe
- 2 minutes read - 251 wordsWe lost our second bid in a week. I’ve been trying to figure out why (which is why I often fight a quixotic battle to get information about why we lose when we do). This one was painful as it was at one of my alma maters. So, when we generate pricing for configurations, we use our latest and greatest pricing data from our suppliers. What if, I dunno … a) the pricing was out of date, and b) the new pricing was much lower than the old pricing?
Sure enough, we got bit by both. Had updated our pricing data the week before we did the first bid, and the other bid response was created 2 weeks after that. Pricing shouldn’t change rapidly on components in a 1 month window … should it? Well, bad news for all those who insist upon 30 day or longer pricing guarantees. Prices change over timescales comparable to days. Processor pricing in this particular case, from our suppliers, for the part we needed, dropped in half. For enough machines, this means that our overall pricing was higher by that amount. So I ran this new number through our spreadsheet, and found out that the bid we lost to on one of the opps, likely was the result of this pricing difference. Yeah. That hurt. We were lower than the winning bid with the corrected pricing. Going to make some changes as a result of this, in how we bid, and how we get pricing.