For many years, the Facilities & Services Printing Department (Printing) has provided free competitive bid preparation for customers at the University of Illinois desiring quotes from outside vendors. Effective July 1, 2006, Printing will no longer prepare these bid specifications for free.
Barb Childers, printing director stated, “ We will provide estimates for our services at no charge, but fees are being established for the preparation of informal competitive quotations and sealed competitive bids.”
Currently, every service
that they perform for the campus must, at a minimum, recover its costs;
state funds have not been available to cover the costs
of this service since FY03. It is for this reason that they are establishing
cost-recovery fees for competitive bid preparation. Childers explained
that they have studied the time and materials that go into bid preparation
and have arrived at the following charges:
• $65.00 for informal competitive
quote preparation
• $90.00 for sealed bids, which require additional steps
Departments should allow five business days for the informal quote and sealed bid preparation. Rush charges may be applied to informal quote or sealed bid print specifications that must be prepared in less than five days. Departments can choose to forgo solicitation of off-campus bids by choosing to work directly with F&S Printing for their printing needs.
The Campus Administrative Manual Policy, Policy of Procurement of Typesetting, Printing, and Binding for the Urbana-Champaign Campus, will be updated to reflect this change. Departments that do not choose to pay F&S Printing a fee for competitive bid preparation must still provide the necessary bid specifications to the Purchasing Division through other means; i.e., in-house staff, designers, etc.
Childers commented, “We realize that this will be a major change for the printing customers on campus. After decades of receiving free bid service, they will have to either pay the established fees or prepare the bids themselves. We are notifying campus communicators via e-mail and are personally visiting frequent users of this service to explain the changes and their options.”
Questions and concerns can be directed to Barb Childers at 244-9486 or via e-mail at bchilder@uiuc.edu.
