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Civil & Infrastructure · Electrical & Mechanical (E&M)
Head contractors don't award E&M packages on price. They award them on who won't blow the commissioning window.
E&M is the last trade standing between a head contractor and practical completion, and their evaluators price that risk into every package award. The bids that win are the ones that prove, licences, test records, commissioning method, rather than promise.
1,000+
Tender submissions lodged
$1B+
Contract value pursued
100%
Client retention
20+ yrs
QS & bid management
The opportunity
How E&M work is actually bought
Most E&M work on Australian infrastructure isn't tendered to the open market, it's packaged. Rail, road, water and building projects carve out their electrical and mechanical scopes, and the head contractor's procurement team awards them through its own supply chain: prequalified subcontractors first, everyone else if they must. Platforms like ICN Gateway surface these packages as projects gear up, which means the contractors who watch the pipeline early get positioned before the package is even released.
The evaluation logic is different from a principal's tender. A head contractor is buying certainty against its own programme, your testing and commissioning sits on their critical path, your licensing is their compliance exposure, and your interface behaviour determines whether their PC date holds. So they evaluate proof: current licences tied to named people, accreditations that check out, commissioning methods that read like they've been executed before.
Get inside a handful of prime-contractor supply chains and the pipeline compounds, the same procurement teams buy E&M packages across every project they deliver.
What we deliver
The full precontracts function, tuned for E&M
01
Bid management
One owner for the package response, head-contractor returnables, technical schedules, clarifications, lodgement. Your project engineers stay on tools, not on formatting.
02
Testing & commissioning methodology
The section that wins E&M packages. Staged testing, energisation sequence, witness points and handover documentation, written as a method your commissioning lead would actually run.
03
Licensing & accreditation proof
An evidence pack that ties every licence, registration and accreditation to a named person and a current date, assembled once, maintained, and deployed on every bid.
04
Interface & programme integration
Responses that show how your works slot into the head contractor's programme, access dependencies, builder's work requirements, and what you need from others stated plainly.
05
Estimating & BOQs
Backed by 20+ years of quantity surveying. Package pricing structured against the technical schedules, so your rates and your commissioning method hold up under a cross-read.
06
ICN Gateway & supply chain positioning
Registrations, capability statements and prequalification submissions targeted at the head contractors whose pipelines you want to be inside, before the packages drop.
How these tenders are scored
What E&M evaluators score, and where bids bleed points
The sections that decide it
- Testing & commissioning methodology, sequence, witness points, records and handover, read against the head contract programme
- Licensing & accreditation, current, verifiable, and attached to the people actually doing the work
- Programme interface, dependencies and access needs declared, not discovered on site
- Methodology & resourcing, crews, supervision and off-site fabrication logic
- Like-for-like package experience, comparable scopes delivered inside comparable programmes
Where the points get lost
- Commissioning shown as a single bar at the end of the programme, the one thing evaluators know is false
- Licences claimed at company level with no named holders behind them
- Interface needs left silent, which evaluators read as variations waiting to happen
- A recycled methodology that describes a different building's services
- A template risk register with no energisation, isolation or vendor-lead-time risk in it
An E&M evaluator is pricing your risk to their programme. Every gap in the bid gets priced against you.
FAQ
E&M tender questions, answered straight
How do we find E&M packages on ICN Gateway?
Register, build a capability profile that names your actual scopes and licences, and watch the project work packages as they're listed, E&M scopes typically appear as head contractors gear up their supply chains. But listing is only visibility. The award still goes through the head contractor's own evaluation, so the profile and the prequalification evidence behind it are what convert a listing into an invitation. We set up and maintain both, and track the packages worth chasing.
How much of an E&M package score is non-price?
Civil tenders commonly score 30–50% on non-price criteria, and E&M package evaluations follow the same logic with a sharper edge: testing, commissioning and licensing are risk items a head contractor will not trade for price. A cheap bid with a thin commissioning method doesn't read as savings, it reads as a delay they'll be explaining to their client.
Can you work with our estimator?
Yes, most of our E&M clients keep pricing in-house because nobody knows their supply rates better. We write the commissioning methodology, licensing evidence and interface responses that decide the technical score, and we make sure the technical schedules, programme and pricing reconcile before lodgement. If you need pricing support as well, that's covered by 20+ years of QS work.
Also in Civil & Infrastructure
E&M package landed on your desk?
Send it through before the technical schedules swallow your week. Go / no-go within 24 hours, licensing check, scoring read, and a straight answer on whether the package is winnable.