Most of the tenders for the Six-Year National Development Plan must meet the three criteria of credentials, specifications and price bids.
The credentials bids look at whether competing companies have sufficient skills and expertise and have undertaken similar work in the past. For example, when constructing a 900-ton incinerator, any company that only has experience with 500-ton incinerators will naturally be in a weaker position on inspection of its credentials.
The specifications bids are very important. An example of these is the specifications for the core mechanical and electrical projects of the high-speed railway. The different carriage widths and weights proposed by competing tenders will necessarily influence the costs for construction. Also, the volume of components that need to be produced and whether they can be easily procured will determine the costs of maintenance. These must all be taken into detailed consideration.
Apart from the specifications bids, there might also be various supplementary conditions. For example, technological transfer conditions. For the high-speed railway, Taiwan demands that it will at least be able to acquire four levels of maintenance technology (including major overhauling and rebuilding). Then there are financial concerns, with the favorability of the conditions of payment of competing companies having to be compared. For example, will only a portion of the total payment have to be delivered while work is in progress, with the balance being paid on completion? Can the restricted period stipulated for exchange of goods be brought forward? Or are there any plans to cooperate with domestic businesses?
Finally, if the conditions of the various contenders measure up to be roughly the same, there is the price bid. Then the level of the price is usually the final deciding factor.
The standards for tenders are simple to speak about. In fact, they can be quite impenetrable. Just the thick volumes of plans sent by competing companies require the expending of much energy to understand. It is said that when some companies have formed alliances with foreign enterprises, even the plans produced by the partners have been so hard to get to grips with that the contract documents are just left to drafted by the opposite parties before they are signed. The result is that, if later on it is discovered that the technological exchange or financial conditions have not been met as planned, then it is too late to escape. This time the plans of the companies bidding for core projects of the high-speed railway must rely on the help of foreign consultancy companies, and still need more than ten years (what a professional person can read in one year) before they are read through. Thus can be seen the general degree of difficulty for deciding on standards.
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