Critical BidsBy Critical Future Ltd
Bid engine for industrial contractors

Turn an enquiry into a priced, compliant tender before your competitors have finished reading it.

Critical Bids reads the enquiry, builds the cost, drafts the response, and then checks the finished document against itself the way the buyer will.


Critical Bids is not self-serve. We work with a small number of industrial contractors and take on new firms by introduction. Tell us about your bidding and we will come back to you.

Compliance matrix, as issued

Every requirement in the enquiry, tracked to a status the document can support. Written in the classifications the client asked for.

REQ-G04Maximum steam generation, 58 t/hComply
REQ-C19Refractory dry out, priced separatelyComply
REQ-S07Tubesheet thicknessComply with comment
REQ-D22Level 3 programme, with tenderDeviation
REQ-G11Three year accident statisticsDeviation

A deviation the engine declares is one the buyer prices. The alternative is one they find.

What it does

Four things, in the order a bid manager does them.

Reads the enquiry

Every priced line, guarantee, stated value, deliverable and shutdown activity becomes a tracked requirement with its own reference. If the enquiry itemises 86 prices and only 40 come back, it notices and asks again.

Builds the cost

Hours, materials and bought-out scope, priced from your own archive of past bids where one exists and from first principles where it does not. Live catalogue prices where the part is a catalogue part.

Drafts the response

Technical proposal, guarantee schedule, programme, inspection plan, commercial schedule and deviations, in your house language, using your company library rather than generic filler.

Checks it against itself

Scope offered in one section and excluded in another. A hydrotest at 1.5 times in the method and 1.3 in the inspection plan. A programme that claims to meet a window its own table overruns. Each one found before the buyer finds it.

Fixes what it can

Where one defensible value already exists in the document, the engine writes it and records what changed. Where the answer needs an engineer, it says so and leaves it alone.

Learns the next one

Every bid you archive, and every win or loss you record against it, prices the bid after it. The engine gets more useful to your firm and no more useful to anyone else's.

Who it is for

Firms bidding fabricated equipment and turnaround work into process plant.

Pressure equipment

Vessels, exchangers, drums, boilers and flare systems, where a tender lives or dies on guaranteed values and a compliance matrix a buyer can trust.

Turnaround execution

Shutdown scope where the window is fixed, the float is contractual, and the programme has to demonstrate both rather than assert them.

Estimating teams under load

Where the constraint is not engineering judgement but the days it takes to turn that judgement into a document that answers every clause.

Register interest

Tell us about your bidding.

We will read it ourselves and reply. If it looks like a fit we will set your team up and approve the addresses that need access.