Case Study - To Bid or Not to Bid? 1.What other factors should Marvin and his team consider? 2.Should they bid on the job?(At-least in 300 words) Background Marvin was the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of his com-pany. The decision of whether or not to bid on a job above a certain dollar value rested entirely upon his shoulders. In the past, his company would bid on all jobs that were a good fit with his companys strategic objectives and the companys win-to-loss ratio was excellent. But to bid on this job would be difficult. The client was requesting certain information in the request for proposal (RFP) that Marvin did not want to release. If Marvin did not comply with the requirements of the RFP, his companys bid would be considered as nonresponsive. Bidding Process Marvins company was highly successful at winning contracts through competitive bidding. The company was project-driven and all of the revenue that came into the company came through winning contracts. Almost all of the clients provided the company with long-term contracts as well as follow-on contracts. Almost all of the contracts were firm-fixed-price contracts. Business was certainly good, at least up until now.Marvin established a policy whereby 5 percent of sales would be used for responding to RFPs. This was referred to as a bid-and-proposal (B&P) budget. The cost for bidding on contracts was quite high and clients knew that requiring the company to spend a great deal of money bidding on a job might force a no-bid on the job. That could eventually hurt the industry by reducing the number of bidders in the marketplace.Marvins company used parametric and analogy estimating on all contracts. This allowed Marvins people to estimate the work at level 1 or level 2 of the work breakdown structure(WBS). From a financial perspective, this was the most cost-effective way to bid on a project knowing full well that there were risks with the accuracy of the estimates at these levels of the WBS. But over the years continuous improvements to the companys estimating process reduced much of the uncertainty in the estimates. New RFP One of Marvins most important clients announced it would be going out for bids for a potential ten-year contract. This contract was larger than any other contract that Marvins company had ever received and could provide an excellent cash flow stream for ten years or even longer. Winning the contract was essential.Because most of the previous contracts were firm-fixed-price, only summary-level pricing at the top two levels of the WBS was provided in the proposal. That was usually sufficient for the companys clients to evaluate the cost portion of the bid.The RFP was finally released. For this project, the contract type would be cost-reimbursable. A WBS created by the client was included in the RFP, and the WBS was broken down into five levels. Each bidder had to provide pricing information for each work package in the WBS. By doing this, the client could compare the cost of each work package from each bidder.The client would then be comparing apples and apples from each bidder rather than apples and oranges. To make matters worse, each bidder had to agree to use the WBS created by the client during project execution and to report costs according to the WBS