HowtoSearchBidsandRespond_VSS3.9.pdf

State of Maine Vendor Self Service

How to find and respond to a bid

Please go to this website to use your userid & password to log in:

https://mevss.hostams.com/webapp/PRDVSS2X1/AltSelfService

If you have not yet registered to obtain a userid & password please click on the VSS Registration Quick Start Guide for step by step instructions.

Please use your userid & password to log into the site.

https://mevss.hostams.com/webapp/PRDVSS2X1/AltSelfService

Once you have successfully logged in, click on the tab “Business Opportunities”

Click on the “Open Solicitations” link.

Here is a sample of an open solicitation where you will notice the RFQ number, the item, the contact person, when it was published and when it closes. It will also display how much time you have left to respond.

Clicking on the Summary button will disclose the same information.

If you have trouble submitting your bid you can contact the buyer for assistance however any other question related to the bid itself will have to be posted on the Q & A List tab – you will find instructions on how to use this tab further down in this document.

Clicking on the Details button will open up the page to the solicitation itself.

All bids will have documents attached so you will want to click on the Attachment tab to download and print off these documents. Some documents you may have to save to your computer to fill out to attach to your response.

The below statement pertains to any bid that you see on this site:

If you have a question regarding this RFQ, you must submit your questions through the Q

& A List tab on the Solicitation page. Your answer will appear there as well. It is the vendor’s responsibility to log in to view all questions and answers posted there.

Questions and Answers obtained any other way will not be valid for this RFQ.

If you have a question you would click on the Q & A List – you will then see an “Ask a

Question” button for you to enter in your question. The screen shot below shows a sample of a vendor asking a question and the resulting answer.

Once you have obtained all the specifications and viewed all questions and answers and are ready to respond to the bid, you would click on the “Respond Online” Button.

Scroll down to the “My Response” section of the RFQ. The Mandatory fields are the

Unit Price and Delivery Days although you can fill out the other fields if you have a need

to. When you put in your Delivery Days only put in a number ie 10, 30, 60 etc. It does not respond to 3-5 days or weeks. You can now click on Save.

If you have files to attach you can click on “3 Attach your Files” and once you do this you will get a message that your response has not been submitted yet. This is ok – the system is just telling you that you haven’t completed the bid process yet.

Click on the Attach Files button.

Click on the Browse button:

Select a file to attach and click on Open or just double click on the file:

Then click the Attach File button.

The page will return you to your bid response page where you will see your file attached.

You may repeat these steps for each additional file you need to attach.

Note: Multiple commodity lines. You could be responding to a bid that has multiple commodity lines – each commodity line will be displayed under each other. You would have to respond to each commodity line in order for your bid to successfully submit. For each commodity line you would either choose to Bid (and put in your amount and delivery days) or you could select Bid with Conditions (and put in your amount and delivery days and a comment), or you could select No Bid (and put in a comment why).

If you do not respond to each commodity line you will receive errors until you do so.

Note: Check for Modifications. If anything is amended on the original RFQ, it will be posted again to the website and you will get a email notification (if your email is in your

VSS account and you have selected the corresponding commodity code in your VSS account). You can check under the Amendment History tab or the bulletin Board tab.

Once you have completed your response you will now be all set to click on “5

Review/Submit. The page will show your Response Summary for you to look at. If you see any changes that need to be made you can go back to make the changes. If you are all set with the summary you can now click the “Submit” button.

When you click on Submit you will get the below message – if you are sure of your response you can click on OK.

You will get the below message:

Now the Buyers do not see your response until after the closing date/time. If you are still not sure if your bid was submitted sucessfully you can always click on Solicitation

Responses and look under Response Status – this will tell you if it was Accepted or not.

You will also receive an e-mail from the system after a hourly batch job is run.

Finding the results of an award. You will not see any result of a bid until an award is made. Once the system e-mails you a notice that an award has been made you would log into the site and click on Business Opportunities, then Recent Awards.

Once you have located the RFQ you want the results on, click on the details button.

You can now click on the Public Bid Reading tab to see all the responses.

Results:

Because the State of Maine awards by best value the low bidder may not be the awarded bidder so you can click on the Notice of Award tab to see who the awarded vendor is.

If you run into any problem and require assistance you can call any of the Purchases Staff to assist you in completing your document.

Purchases Staff information can be located on the Division of

Purchases website at http://www.maine.gov/purchases/info/contact.shtml.

http://www.maine.gov/purchases/info/contact.shtml