Interviewed by the client's tender committee

During tender process, the client's tender committee can invite the vendor to be interviewed for clarifying certain issues or unclear statements specified in the proposal submitted by the vendor. After the client has clarified the issues they have, they might find out that actually, the vendor has given a better "idea" to refine the statements specified in the RFP (Request for Proposal) issued by the client earlier on. Then the client may scrap the previous RFP or tender documentation and initiate a new tender. Then, in the new tender, the client can include the things they found useful through previous clarification or interview.

Although the client has this option, but it may be negative effect on the vendor. The vendor's effort to respond to this kind of process involves additional pre-sale cost. However, as a vendor, we cannot run away from this if we need the business from the client. However, the client still has option to plan their evaluation process to suite their preferred vendor. If you know that you are not their preferred vendor, save a bit of effort on a higher chance tender.

The tender evaluation process can be tailored in any way to give higher marks or weightage on certain areas. For example, the preferred vendor can provide feature A and D better. So, the evaluation process can give higher weightage to feature A and D. That means that in the evaluation form, it may say 30% on feature A, and 30% on feature D, feature C 10%, etc. But, these evaluation criteria is not available to the vendor, so the vendor has to be smart "enough" to know what is considered important to the client.

:-)