What to Send Before Asking for a Steel Price

Most price requests in this trade are one line and an attachment. The line asks for a price on the drawing. The drawing shows a plan, an elevation and a span. The supplier answers within a day, because answering is easy when the specification is incomplete: the unknowns are resolved by assumption, and the assumptions are made in the supplier's favour, which is what makes the reply fast.

The result is a number that looks like a price and is actually a quote for a building nobody specified. This note is the input list that fixes that, in the order that matters.

The nine inputs

The list is short because a steel building is a simple object described by a small number of dimensions. What makes the list worth writing down is not its length but the fact that the same three items are missing from almost every first request.

The five dimensional inputs

Span, length, eave height, bay spacing and the roof pitch or slope. Four of the five are usually on the drawing and bay spacing usually is not, because bay spacing is a design decision that the supplier makes unless the buyer has a reason. Stating it anyway is worth doing: bay spacing drives the purlin count, the frame weight and the container plan, and a buyer who leaves it open is leaving one of the largest variables in the quotation to the supplier.

The four specification inputs

Design wind speed in km/h with its source, roof and wall build-up including insulation, the openings with their sizes and types, and the delivery term with a named place. These four decide the frame, the envelope, the detailing and the commercial basis, and they are the four that a drawing almost never carries. A request that states the dimensions and omits these four has described a shape rather than a building.

The three that are almost always missing

Across the requests that arrive in our inbox, three items are absent far more often than the rest. Each of them changes the answer substantially, which is why their absence produces quotes that cannot be compared rather than quotes that are merely rough.

The design wind speed and where it comes from

Wind speed determines the frame, and the frame is most of the steel. A building designed for a mild inland site and a building designed for a coastal or cyclone-affected site are not the same building, even at the same span, and the difference is not a small percentage. State the speed in km/h and state the source: a national code, a site study, or the client's own requirement. If none of those exists, say so explicitly, because the supplier then knows to ask rather than to assume.

Whether the price includes erection, and who is the importer

Two commercial questions that change the shape of the reply. Ask explicitly whether erection is included, and if not, whether the supplier can recommend an erector, since the answer determines whether the site cost is inside or outside the comparison. Then state who will be the importer of record, because that decides whether the price should be ex-works, free on board or delivered, and those three are not comparable with each other.

The openings, counted rather than described

Openings are where quotations diverge most quietly. A request that says with doors and windows will produce a price based on whatever the supplier assumes. Count them, size them and name the type: roller shutter, sliding, personnel door, louvre, skylight. Each opening carries framing, flashing and often a different cladding detail, and a building with six openings is a different fabrication job from the same building with sixteen.

How to send it so the answer is comparable

The format of the request determines whether the replies can be placed side by side. Three suppliers asked in three different ways will answer in three different ways, and the comparison then costs more than the requests saved.

One table, sent identically to every supplier

Put the nine inputs in a single table and send the same table to every supplier, with the drawing attached to all of them. Ask each supplier to return the table filled in with their assumptions where they disagree. The replies then differ only in the places where the suppliers actually differ, which is the only comparison worth making. Number the rows so that a reply can be answered line by line, and keep the numbering stable when a second round is sent, because a supplier who has to renumber their assumptions will renumber them differently.

Ask for the weight basis and the section list with the price

Ask for the calculated weight and the section list alongside the figure. These two documents are what make two quotations comparable, because they show whether the two frames are the same frame. A supplier who will not release a section list before an order cannot be compared with one who will, and the refusal is itself a datum. Ask also which wind speed the weight was calculated against, since a tonnage without that figure cannot be reconciled with any other tonnage, including one from the same supplier on a later project.

What to do with three prices that differ

Three replies will not agree. The instinct is to pick the middle one, which is a way of avoiding the analysis rather than performing it. The differences are informative and they can be read.

Tonnage first, total last

Compare tonnage before comparing totals. Two quotations for the same building with materially different tonnage are quoting two different frames, and the difference will be traceable to the wind speed, the bay spacing, the purlin spacing or the bracing. Once the tonnages agree, the totals are comparable and the remaining differences are scope and margin. If the tonnages cannot be reconciled by asking, that is the finding, and no amount of reading the totals will get past it.

The supplier who asks the most questions

Among replies that are otherwise similar, prefer the supplier who comes back with questions. Questions mean the specification was read rather than assumed, and a supplier who asks before quoting is a supplier who will ask before fabricating. A swift quote on an incomplete request is not efficiency; it is an answer to a question that was never asked. Count the questions across the replies before reading the prices, because the count is a better predictor of how the project will run than any figure in the documents.