DOT work is bid as unit prices against estimated quantities, and the contractor's number is the sum of unit prices times quantities measured against the engineer's estimate. Reading the bid schedule and the quantities right is the whole game.
What unit price bidding involves
Heavy civil DOT work is awarded on a unit price basis: the proposal lists bid items with estimated quantities, the contractor enters a unit price for each, and payment is made on the quantities actually built and measured. The engineer's estimate sets the baseline the bids are compared against, and unbalanced bidding rules limit how far a contractor can shift price between items. The bid schedule, the quantities, and the measurement rules decide the number.
Why the bid schedule is easy to misread
The bid items, the estimated quantities, and the measurement and payment provisions sit across the proposal and the standard specifications, and a misread quantity, an overlooked item, or a misunderstanding of how an item is measured changes the bid. A contractor working many lettings has to extract and check the full bid schedule on each one.
How an AI bid agent reads the bid schedule
An AI bid agent reads each letting, extracts the bid items and estimated quantities, and surfaces the measurement and payment provisions and the items that carry the most quantity risk. The estimating team works from a clean bid schedule with the measurement rules attached.
You can see how the agent reads a letting in our AI tender agent demo for civil and infrastructure contractors. It extracts the bid schedule and measurement rules so the unit price bid is built on clean quantities.