Do your Burao suppliers have enough quotations experience?

A supplier quotations experience gap appears in Burao when the firms pricing materials and subcontract packages have not handled that item, at that quantity, for that kind of project before. The gap rarely shows up in the price itself. It shows up in the assumptions the price rests on: quantity, unit, delivery point, validity, and who carries transport, duty and wastage. Those assumptions then travel into the main bid and into the works.

What is a supplier quotations experience gap in Burao?

It is the distance between the package being priced and the closest thing a supplier has actually quoted before. A firm may know cement, timber or pipe as products and still have never quoted the quantity, delivery sequence or specification a particular building needs. The delivered price then depends on how the material is packed, how much fits on a lorry, where the load is offloaded, and the haul and ground conditions on the route, so a supplier who has not quoted under comparable conditions can produce a number that looks reasonable and cannot be held to anything. Confirm the haul route and site access with the project's engineer before you compare rates. The record behind that number does not cover this job, so the cost assumptions have no base. Ask each supplier which comparable supply they have quoted, and what quantity arrived on site.

How does it put Burao projects at risk?

Unsupported cost assumptions enter the main bid as fixed numbers and become disputes later. When the supplier's written quotation leaves out transport, offloading, wastage, duty or a validity period, the main contractor's price absorbs whatever was missed, and the first casualty is usually the specification or the programme. A thin quotation can also hide a capacity limit: the supplier may be able to deliver a trial order but not the full quantity at the pace the site needs. Where supervision on site is light, nobody rechecks the quantity or unit against the actual order. The result can be a delayed pour, substituted material, or a claim that the original quotation never covered the item. This says nothing about Burao suppliers in general. It is a predictable consequence of accepting a price without the record behind it.

How do you check quotations before you rely on them?

Ask for written quotations on the supplier's letterhead and read the assumptions, not just the total. Each quotation should state the item and specification, the quantity, the unit, the delivery point, whether transport and offloading are included, the validity period, and any duty or tax treatment. Compare the quoted unit against the unit used in the bill of quantities; a quote priced per length but ordered per piece will not match. Ask for two recent supply records of similar scale, and walk a site that supplier delivered to if one is within reach. On labour and subcontract packages, ask for the names and roles of the people who will actually work, not the firm's overall experience. For client-side checks, the municipal engineer's office can say which permits and approvals the plot needs, and the project's engineer can confirm the specification and testing requirements quoted against.

What to do next

Take the two largest material or subcontract lines in the bid and pull the supplier quotation behind each one. Check that specification, quantity, unit, delivery point and validity appear, and that the unit matches the bill of quantities. Send any quotation missing those items back to the supplier for restatement, and file the corrected version with the bid so the assumption behind the number is visible to the evaluator.