Bidding A Large 40 School Project - Advice Requested

Are your prices competitive as is? If not find a new supplier (time to shop around depending on the brand you implement) that will allow you to have margin and still be competitive. Do NOT fall to the fear that you can't win a bid without selling your cameras at cost and do not ever let clients/potential clients know your costs. We are trying to sustain an industry and prevent further degradation in pricing wars.

Also, you do also have to fight them a bit on uniform pricing per run/point. Price out the average and account for Murphy's Law and do note what you just mentioned (old construction and inconsistencies that are encountered) to protect your bottom line. If they are unwilling to allow you to price conditionally, then just shift up your baseline pricing by the percentage you can foresee abnormalities for. In business terms, I'd put in a sufficiently sized "miscellaneous" budget.

As far as anything else is concerned, my primary advice is be reasonable.

"It has the be the same price per camera, alarm point, as well as per access control device. No way to differentiate the three."

This sounds like the worst written specification ever.  I'm guessing they wrote it internally or brought in a consultant looking to "prove their worth" by having the integrators jump through hoops providing unnecessary data.  What are they going to do have Integrator X install just the exterior devices and integrator Y install the interior devices based on pricing?

I would pass.

If you don't pass, just cover yourself and hope that everyone else passes.

If everyone passes maybe the spec writer will re-evaluate their approach.  I have seen this happen a couple times, particularly on public school bids.

You might want to reevaluate trying to estimate this in the first place if you don't know what you need to hit margin-wise to stay in business.

As a "purchaser" (end user), I have been involved in writing specs that include requirements for per-unit pricing.  There are a number of reasons that organizations choose to go this route, not the least of which is the desire of an administrator (decision maker/executive) to be able to "know" what each device is going to cost.  Admittedly, there are drawbacks to this type of pricing, but there are benefits as well, which can be debated in separate thread.  We obviously want to get the most bang for the least buck, but not at the expense of having someone successfully win a competitive bid and not be able to complete the project down the road because they cannot afford to do the job (or do it properly).

That said, I typically expect entities bidding on projects I have managed to make a profit.  Where they put that profit is up to them.  Parts?  Labor?  Both?  Having seen various companies use all of those options, I will say that the most successful of them are the ones that add margin to both parts and labor. 

Think about what your risk exposures are, your tolerance for for loss or cost overruns in both parts and labor, and make your decision based on your own unique business environment. 

Lets say, for example, you bid parts at cost and those costs unexpected rise because the manufacturer loses a key parts supplier and has to significantly raise prices to cover their new costs.  If you didn't have a margin in your device pricing, you could potentially eat the full cost of that price increase as a loss rather than having it erode a profit margin.  Or let's say that labor rates unexpectedly increase over the course of the project.  If you were not pricing your labor with at least some level of margin, again you would face a loss rather than lower profit.

These are highly simplified examples, and I have no idea what your business model is, what your tolerance for absorbing unexpected costs are, or any number of other factors.  Make the decision that best fits your long-term business strategy and goals.  If you don't know what those are, then that is a whole other set of issues you should resolve before knowing what pricing structure is best for the health of your company.

Many times the " administrators" want to be able to pick and choose after the fact with a reduced budget and in essence they try and do their own design once the bids are let and the budget denied...this is always a recipe for disaster in my experience as many of the school admins at the district level and principals for that matter have little to no common sense and they think they are smarter then any they deal with....I know that sounds very harsh but again in my experience it has been the case so many times...once you do the final install with their hand prints all over the design you still own it and they will forget it was them who had the last say in what went where...That is really bad place to be in...GSA used to do that on many of our project bids

...Get many bids, cherry pick the cheapest sections from each bid, cobble it together and come up with a budget...UGH!! Be very careful!! Good luck.