Thursday, January 13, 2011

Onvia-Demandstar - Plans & Specs for public-sector Construction Projects

In the previous post (which was about iSqFt), I mentioned “Onvia-Demandstar”.

OnVia-Demandstar is a technology company providing “bid and rfp” hosting and announcement services to city and county government agencies. Specifically, to the “procurement” or “purchasing” departments of city and county government agencies. I signed up for a “free” subscription to access and research Hillsborough County (FL) public bid/rfp announcements.

For this blog post, I selected a current procurement (by Hillsborough County) for the “construction” of a bridge rehab project.

Below, you see the “main” announcement of this project; basically, the announcement to prospective bidders:

Bid Identifier

Bid Status

Broadcast Date

Date Due

Name

Actions

ITB-C-0068-0-2011/MK

Active

12/6/10

2/1/11

WEST COLUMBUS DRIVE SWING BRIDGE REHABILITATION

Details, Planholders, Download/Order

After one clicks on “download/order”, it brings up what you see immediately below:

Request Bid Package

Agency Name: Hillsborough County BOCC

Bid Name: West Columbus Drive Swing Bridge Rehab

Bid Status: Active

Download Electronic Documents “for free” (this is one option)

Document Title

Size (KB)

Est. Download Time at 56K

Action

Bid Document Specs, VOLUME 1 OF 4

1,291.80

5 Min. 31 Sec.

Download

BID DOCUMENT SPECS - VOLUME 2 OF 4

23,270.33

1 Hrs. 39 Min. 17 Sec.

Download

Bid Document Specs, VOLUME 3 OF 4

14,692.80

1 Hrs. 3 Min. 41 Sec.

Download

BID DOCUMENT SPECS - VOLUME 4 OF 4

8,268.14

35 Min. 17 Sec.

Download

Plans 1 of 2

23,174.14

1 Hrs. 39 Min. 53 Sec.

Download

Plans 2 of 2

29,447.36

2 Hrs. 6 Min. 39 Sec.

Download

Sign in sheet

328.53

1 Min. 24 Sec.

Download

Addendum No. 1

1,253.06

5 Min. 21 Sec.

Download

Addendum No. 2

16.52

0 Min. 4 Sec.

Download

Totals

101,743 KB

7 Hrs. 14 Min. 7 Sec.

[Or, option 2, order (printed set of documents) By Mail]

Reproduction Cost

$344.12

Handling Cost

$0.00

+ Shipping Cost

(to be selected)

Okay, so now for the “big question”. If I want to order a set of hard-copy documents, who does the printing for that order? And, a second question, who benefits from the revenue ($344.12) generated by that print order?

You may find this interesting (I did); when I clicked on “planholders” for this construction project - and a few others - two companies repeatedly appeared as “planholders” – iSqFt and Onvia/Demandstar. Hmmm, I wonder why that is?

No comments:

Post a Comment