Evaluation governance

TruBuild is designed for defensible tender evaluation. The AI does not make the decision. It gives your evaluation team a faster first pass, a cleaner review surface, and a complete record of what people accepted, changed, queried, and awarded. This matters in construction procurement because the award recommendation is usually challenged: by an unsuccessful bidder, an owner-side auditor, a funder, or your own committee six months later. Governance is what lets you answer “why this contractor, at this price, on this evidence” without reconstructing spreadsheets and email threads. Use this page as the baseline governance model for enterprise tender teams.

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Governance principles

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Access levels

Every package member has one of four access levels. The level controls what they can create, change, and approve. The commercial and technical separation is strict in both directions: Commercial access cannot open technical evaluation screens, and Technical access cannot open commercial ones. On owner-led tenders this keeps pricing visibility from biasing technical scoring and vice versa. TruBuild enforces this in the interface, not just in policy. Restricted actions such as Run New Round, Create and run evaluation, and Award package appear disabled for users without the required level, with a Read-only access tooltip explaining why. Access levels come from your role assignments: a package role overrides a project role, and organization owners and admins always have full access. See Roles and permissions for how to map procurement, commercial, and technical teams onto these levels, including the probity-driven separation of commercial and technical teams on owner-led tenders.

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Who can trigger what

Technical evaluation actions (proposal review, criteria scoring, and technical clarifications) require Full or Technical access. See Technical evaluation for that workflow.

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Round integrity

A round is a controlled snapshot of one workflow (commercial or technical) inside a package. Commercial and technical rounds are created independently but share the same package context: contractors, documents, weights, tender queries, and the award record. Each round records its creation time, its last update time, and every override applied to it. Each round moves through four statuses. The status tells you whether the results in front of you are safe to review. Switch between rounds with the Select round dropdown on the commercial pages. Prior rounds stay intact when you run a new one, so the difference between initial pricing and post-clarification pricing remains auditable. For round naming, triggers, and the full multi-round sequence, see Rounds and clarifications.

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Human review record

Governance depends on separating what the bidder submitted from what your team judged. TruBuild keeps both visible.

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Received vs normalized

The vendor comparison table has a bid mode toggle:

• Received shows the original bid exactly as extracted from the contractor’s submission.
• Normalized shows the comparison after your team’s overrides are applied.

Always confirm which mode a screenshot, export, or committee figure came from. A commercial position based on normalized figures is only defensible if the overrides behind it are explained.

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Overrides and evidence

On any line item in the vendor comparison, evaluators with Full or Commercial access can:

• Click the pencil icon to adjust a vendor amount or rename an item, with the change persisted in the round record.
• Click the trash icon to remove an override and revert to the received value.
• Add notes or comments explaining the judgment.
• Open the source document link to see the page in the contractor’s submission that the value came from.

Values TruBuild filled in where a bidder left a gap are dimmed and marked Imputed, so evaluators never mistake an assumption for a submitted price. Exclusions and unpriced items carry badges and flow into the submission quality scoring, which keeps scope gaps visible rather than buried in a spreadsheet footnote.

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Commercial controls

Commercial evaluation should answer one question: which bidder is commercially most advantageous after exclusions, unpriced items, anomalies, and clarifications are understood? The Pricing Integrity and Submission Quality scorecards grade each bidder from A to F. Treat any low grade as a prompt for review and clarification, not a conclusion: a bidder graded low on Submission Quality may simply have priced against a different BOQ revision, and that is exactly the kind of finding the record should show a human investigated.

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Commercial review checklist

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Technical controls

Technical evaluation should answer one question: which bidder best satisfies the scope, criteria, and owner requirements at the agreed technical weighting? Completing the technical score review is not optional paperwork. TruBuild blocks the award until the review of the latest technical round is complete, which guarantees a human signed off on the scores that support the recommendation.

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Tender query controls

Pre-tender and post-tender queries are not administrative noise. They are part of the award evidence. Each query carries its own status, owner, designated approver, due date, and audit history, so a committee can trace who drafted a response, who approved it, and when it went to the tenderer. Three rules keep the register defensible:

• Nothing goes out unapproved. Responses move through Pending Approval before they can be sent, so a designated approver signs off every answer that reaches a bidder.
• Categories are owned. Use the Technical, Commercial, Contractual, and General categories consistently, so the commercial and technical leads each run an accountable queue.
• Closures are explained. A closed query should carry a meaningful close reason (Resolved, Withdrawn, Duplicate, Merged, or Other), because an auditor reads an unexplained closure as an unanswered question.

See Tender queries for the full status model, approval workflow, and reporting.

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Award sign-off

The award is the single most audited action in the process, so TruBuild gates it hardest: only Full access can award, and the technical review must be complete first. On the award page you select an eligible contractor (only contractors ranked in both the technical and commercial evaluations qualify), review the technical and commercial summary for that contractor, and record award comments. Treat the comments as mandatory in practice: they are the committee’s justification and the auditor’s first stop. If the technical review on the latest round is incomplete, the Award package button stays disabled until it is done. The step-by-step award walkthrough, with examples of strong and weak award comments, is in Award readiness.

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Audit trail

TruBuild records governance-relevant actions automatically, with the acting user and a timestamp. Organization administrators can review the activity log in the Activity section under Settings, and each evaluation round keeps its own record of overrides and exports. Two properties make this record useful in a dispute:

• It is passive. Evaluators do not have to remember to log anything. If a round exists, its creation is recorded; if an export left the system, its scope is recorded.
• It is scoped. Export logging captures which vendors, rounds, and divisions a workbook contained, so you can establish exactly what a committee or external reviewer saw and when.

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Evidence exports

Each export is a fixed snapshot for the tender file. The filename embeds the asset or package name and the round or date, so a workbook found on a shared drive months later still identifies which evaluation state it came from. When you export the commercial comparison, you choose which vendors to include, rate or amount display, whether to include the PTE, and whether to export Received or Normalized figures. State those choices in the committee pack; the audit trail logs the same scope against the export event, so the pack and the log corroborate each other.

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Award readiness

Before a package is awarded, the procurement manager should be able to answer:

• Which contractor is selected, and is it ranked in both evaluations?
• Which technical round and commercial round support the recommendation, and are both marked Ready and reviewed?
• Which material PTCs and tender queries remain open?
• Which figures were manually overridden, and does each override carry a note?
• Is the committee figure based on Received or Normalized bids?
• Why did the team choose the selected contractor over the nearest alternatives?

See Award readiness for the final committee checklist.

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