Laserlight schrieb:
> > But you still buy from the lowest bidder, do you ?
But assuming both provide the same 'quality' you would go for the cheaper one?
And possibly, there are cases where you say 'A is better than B, but B is
cheaper. And we can buy 10 of B's ships for 9 of A's and that difference is
more important than the quality difference'
So there is still an incentive to bid low.
> Is it part of neccessary development (to be paid by the contractor)
or a
> change request (to be paid by the buyer) ?
> From my experience (not in defence, but it can hardly be different
And for any project that includes any kind of research and development, you
can't specify everything beforehand.
> Upgrades can go out for bid just like anything else.
That's fine for an upgrade of the finished product. Rather more difficult for
an upgrade of something that's just being built (the starting point of this
discussion).
> It may be fiscally advantageous to go back to the original source,
Not always easy to know whether he's overcharging (at least if he is careful
and not too greedy). There are a lot of bookkeeping tricks.
Greetings
On or about Thu, Jul 04, 2002 at 12:46:06PM +0200,
KH.Ranitzsch@t-online.de typed:
> From my experience (not in defence, but it can hardly be different
<bitter laughter>
That's when the buyer doesn't say "oh, we've got what we wanted, now we're not
going to pay you and watch you go bankrupt"...
> On Thu, 4 Jul 2002 KH.Ranitzsch@t-online.de wrote:
> > Is it part of neccessary development (to be paid by the contractor)
This sounds eerily familiar.. And I am in the defence market:)
Cheers,
KH said:
> > >From my experience (not in defence, but it can hardly be
(to
> > be paid by the contractor) 'No, X was not specified. It is a
Derk said:
> This sounds eerily familiar.. And I am in the defence market :)
Sounds familiar to me too, from when I was selling linguistics--and
linguistics is quite a fuzzy thing to sell (eg take any Japanese text and hand
it to five Japanese linguists. I'll bet you that all five
find things they say are wrong--and each one will be different from
the rest. How do you guarantee "translation quality"?). But when that kind of
thing happens, it ordinarily bespeaks sloppiness on the part of the selling
company. Usually they're too eager to get the contract to spell out all the
costs; or sometimes they simply don't know what they're talking about. Or
both. In which case, the buyer is within his rights to say "you screwed up, so
you're paying the overrun." (<g> Last year Dupont said "we think your bid is
too low, compared to the other bidders"--so I said "would you feel
more comfortable if I put in an extra review cycle for, oh, another
15%?"...and they bought it!) I've also seen the buyer pressure the sales rep
to take change
orders for free--okay, it's a buyer's job to try to get stuff cheap,
but the sales rep can always tell him to take a hike. If the client
whines about penny-ante stuff, that's a client you're better off