Case: KONE

FORTEM has assisted KONE with two tenders for lift-maintenance services. The first tender was from the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces, where FORTEM helped KONE get prequalified. The second tender was from the Danish Building and Property Agency, where FORTEM assisted KONE during the entire bid phase for the tender.

KONE is a global service company that delivers elevators, escalators, door- and gate solutions. KONE has 52.000 employees all over the world with 225 of them working in Denmark. The company is more than 100 years old, which is a solid testament to KONE’s experience within the business field.

KONE has years of experience with procurements and tenders. Traditionally, the winning criteria for lift-maintenance tenders has been the lowest offered price. But today, quality criteria like security, solution, implementation, service and quality control have been given more and more weight in the total evaluation of the bids.

“In our line of business, the most important criteria for our client are having the highest level of safety and operational reliability, as well as having as low operational costs as possible. We still see some of the traditional types of tenders, where the only evaluation criterion is price. But price does not say anything about the operational reliability of the offered solution,” says Thomas Ohm, CEO at KONE.

Through the years, KONE has developed a high level of quality control, and they do not wish to compromise their high standards. Their solutions include regular quality control of elevators, which ensures fewer failures for their clients – something KONE feels should be an important criterion for the client.

FORTEM was already speaking with KONE before the tender was released, where the public buyer and the supplier were having a dialogue about the procurement material. FORTEM assisted KONE with phrasing of the questions and answers in the process.

“FORTEM’s assistance in the dialogue phase before the tender was released has had a great impact for KONE, because their input contributed to giving the public authority an understanding of how their weighting of the quality criteria impacted the tender. This resulted in a more equal weighting between price and quality in the tender,” Thomas Ohm says.

“In our line of business, the most important criteria for our client are having the highest level of safety and operational reliability, as well as having as low operational costs as possible”

Despite KONE’s great experience with tenders, they still made the decision to get assistance from FORTEM.

First of all, Thomas wanted to try a different approach to bidding on public tenders. He wanted a fresh set of eyes to go over the bid material and to bring a new perspective to the process.

“There might be things, that we are unable to pick up on due to our in-house perspective. We chose to contact FORTEM in order to get a different point of view on the material and to get assistance from someone, who had a different type of experience with public tenders”.

The collaboration between FORTEM and KONE has been good according to both parties. They had a good flow of information between them, and all of the deadlines were met. In Thomas’ opinion, dialogue is the key to a good collaboration. 

To him, a good dialogue is a dialogue based on straight forward communication between the involved parties, where you are on the same page, understand one another clearly and know who is responsible for what.

Timely communication is also a crucial factor for Thomas. Deadlines have to be met, and FORTEM is good at meeting them according to Thomas.FORTEM assisted KONE with quality assurance of their descriptions and ensured that KONE answered the criteria and demands of the tender thoroughly.

FORTEM also helped convert all of KONE’s qualitative descriptions to a language that everyone understands in order to make the descriptions fit the context, that the public buyer was asking for. “FORTEM helped elevate and impact the quality of the material, that we uploaded, in a way that ensured that we received the maximum score for our qualitative descriptions in our bid for the Danish Building and Property Agency’ tender.”

“FORTEM helped elevate and impact the quality of the material, that we uploaded, in a way that ensured that we received the maximum score for our qualitative descriptions in our bid”

Today, KONE uses some of the material that FORTEM helped them write in other contexts, and Thomas has no doubt when he says: ”It is of great value to us, to be able to use FORTEM’s assistance for other bids, because the quality assurance, that FORTEM offers, is so essential.”

“I would recommend using FORTEM’s assistance and expertise, when you bid on public tenders. You should definitely consider trying it out – regardless of how good you think your skillset is. It is not only small and medium-sized companies, who need help – I believe, that everyone can draw benefits from it,” Thomas Ohm concludes.

KONE won the tender from the Danish Building and Property Agency, where quality and price were evaluated equally. Even though KONE offered a higher price than some of their competitors, KONE won the tender, because their qualitative descriptions received the highest score in the evaluation.