Tender
A formal offer to carry out work at a stated price, submitted in response to an invitation. In construction it is also the whole process — floating the package, answering queries, receiving bids, and evaluating them.
The unglamorous truth about tendering is that most of its value is created before any bid arrives. A well-defined scope, a clean BOQ, a properly answered set of queries — these produce comparable bids. A vague scope produces bids that differ by more than price, and no amount of clever evaluation recovers that.
And a tender is expensive for the bidder. Which is why a pool of bidders who believe the process is fair is a commercial asset: run one sham tender to justify a decision already made, and the good contractors will price your next one accordingly, or not price it at all.