State of Wisconsin had to replace its plan & spec printing contractor (vendor went out of business)

I previously did a blog-post about a procurement by the State of Wisconsin for plan and spec printing services for State construction projects. I don’t recall exactly when it was that I did that previous blog-post, and I’m too lazy to look up when I did that post.

Today’s post is a “follow-up” post of sorts. What happened? Well, the reprographics vendor the State awarded the work to …. went out of business! So, the State needed to quickly get a new reprographics vendor in place. The State just completed (I guess it was on September 2^nd) the new procurement, which the State handled by the use of some sort of “quick bid” process. The State did issue a procurement document covering the specifics of the work and outlining how bidders were to bid on this procurement. I’ve placed a copy of the bid document in my Google Docs library, and you can access that document at this Internet address:

http://tinyurl.com/3roptfg

This was kind of an unusual bid, because of the way pricing had to be quoted. Bidders had to bid a “per square foot” unit price, a) for full-size printing and b) for half-size printing. All services associated with the work – including downloading files from the State’s web-site, preparing the files to print, printing, binding, wrapping, labeling and state-wide UPS shipping. Yes, that’s right, the unit price bid for printing had to include the cost of shipping! And, yes, the per-sq-ft unit price applied not just to “large-format” plans (full and half-size), but to specs as well.

The awarded bidder was Mastergraphics. Based on the bid-abstract I looked at, Mastergraphics left a lot of money on the table. Perhaps the reason why the previous vendor went out of business was that it underestimated the cost it would incur for shipping costs?