Procurement & finance
Bid Levelling
Adjusting tenders onto a like-for-like basis before comparing them — normalising for exclusions, qualifications, different assumptions and scope gaps, so that the comparison is of price rather than of what was left out.
A bid is rarely low because the bidder is efficient. It is usually low because something is missing — an exclusion buried on page forty, a qualification about access, an assumption about who supplies the crane.
Levelling is the work of finding those and adding them back. It is tedious, it is the most valuable hour in the procurement process, and it is the step that gets compressed when the award is urgent — which is precisely when the gaps get through.