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Advertising versus Bidder conferences
These are two things that you’ll see as part of procurement for the PMP exam, and it’s really great to know the difference between both just in case.
There are many different methods of attracting a relevant seller to procure an item or a service from, and you’ll come across advertising and bidder conferences either in your project management work or during the PMP exam. Bidder conferences you might also see called Contractor Conferences or Vendor Conferences and pre-bid conferences – these are meetings between the buyer (which is us) where we’re buying a service or a product, and perspective sellers. So there might be quite a few different sellers of a particular service that we need, and we’re actually meeting all of these sellers.
Why Use Bidder Conferences?
We use these bidder conferences to ensure that all prospective bidders have a clear and common understanding of the procurement, and no bidders receive preferential treatment because we’re either seeing them all at the same time or very close to each other, and everyone has very similar or the same information.
Advertising
Now the opposite of that is advertising where we’re communicating with our list of potential sellers and with those potential sellers – we might actually be able to expand that list by placing advertisements in general circulation publications, newspapers or internet ads or in specialty trade publications, so that the sellers understand that we’re coming out and we wanting to be buying their service or their product. Most government jurisdictions require public advertising or online posting of pending government contracts just to ensure that it is fair and that everyone is aware that it’s going on.
And those are two of the things that you’ll see as part of procurement on the PMP exam.
– David McLachlan