Bid pricing decision support: Some preliminary considerations

In this paper we describe the problem of pricing bids in response to a tender offer and examine the information needs and decision support required for resolving this problem. For most bids, the bid pricing is not done by one person but rather by a multidisciplinary team so that the support for bid pricing needs to be for this process as opposed to for an individual decision maker. We examine the basic structure for a bid pricing decision support architecture to support the bid pricing process and what needs to go into each component module. Finally, we outline the research being done to develop prototype decision aids for the bid pricing process of both a large firm as well as of a small firm.