How To Use DLA Bid Calculation Features In Loocey

Overview

In this tutorial, we’ll explore the DLA Bid Calculation features in Loocey. You’ll learn how to automate your cost, profit, and bid price calculations for DLA solicitations, and see how Loocey brings all supplier, product, and service data together for accurate bid analysis. We’ll walk through how to compare supplier quotes, set margins, adjust totals, and review final bid values in real time. These tools help you make faster, data-driven bidding decisions and ensure every bid is both competitive and profitable.

For related tutorials, check out: 1. How To Use 1-Click Copy To Copy RFQ to CRM Bidding Board - 2. How To Use DLA Bid Management Features In Loocey -

Step by step

The walkthrough covered in the video, written out so you can follow along inside Loocey.

1. The bid calculation tools allow you to automate the calculation of your cost, profit, and bid unit price for DLA solicitations.
2. This is an essential part of Loocey’s DLA module, helping you analyze your numbers and finalize accurate bid information before submitting the bid. It’s essential to go through these steps and fully understand the costs, profits and margins to avoid errors or business losses.
3. We’ll start with using our 1-click copy to copy a solicitation from DLA RFQs list into our Bidding Board. choose one that has at least 2 approved sources
4. The 1-click copy is one of the most powerful features of Loocey, it minimizes data entry and automatically copies the RFQ information and links the records to the suppliers in the system. Check out the link below for a complete tutorial on 1-click copy feature.
5. Once we copy it, let’s go back to the Bidding Board.
6. The newly copied solicitation will appear right at the top, with most of the information already populated — including the solicitation number, NSN, Quantity, and other fields.
7. Now, let’s change the Status to In Progress and open it in Detail View to start working on our calculations.
8. Now let’s open the record in Detail view. We can either click on Open Item icon or right click and open a new tab, which sometimes is easier when we want to work on multiple RFQs at once.
9. Inside the detail view, you’ll see multiple sections such as:
10. Service Details, and
11. Let’s focus first on the Supplier Quotes table.
12. This is where you’ll do RFQ Emails, enter and compare supplier data once the quotes are received, — including quoted prices, lead times, and shipping costs.
13. Suppose one supplier offers a quote of $9.5 per unit, and your second supplier quotes $10.
14. We can enter these in the supplier quotes table.
15. Once you know which supplier quote you want to for this RFQ, simply go to the Product Details tab, most of the information should already be filled in from our 1-click copy. Now, all we have to do is select the supplier we want to use from the suppliers drop down.
16. In this case, we’ll go with the one that quoted us with a lower price.
17. Note that it’ll auto populate the supplier cage once we select the supplier, which we’ll need for bidding.
18. Then, simply enter the quoted unit price, and margin.
19. system will calculate your total cost, margin, and profit, updating the bid unit price in real time as you edit the fields.
20. Note that we also have Tax and Shipping. You can leave these empty or enter values if you want to track tax/shipping per line item.
21. Next, we have the Adjustment column. This is handy if you want to use this to adjust the totals. Let’s say we want to reduce it by 100 dollars, we can enter -100 or we can enter a positive number to increase the total.
22. The system will combine the inputs from all the columns and show you the total cost, average margin and profit at the top as well as Bid Unit Price, which is key for placing our bid.
23. Next, let’s look at the Service Detail tab.
24. Here we can capture any additional costs we have associated with this contract, such as Packaging cost, Labor cost or shipping cost.
25. Let’s add a new item and select Packaging from the drop down.
26. We’ll enter Quantity matching our quantity at the top, and rate, we’ll use $3 dollars for this example. This simply indicates it’ll cost us $3 dollars to package each unit.
27. And again, the system will calculate and combine the costs from product and service details and show at the top the total Cost we have.
28. Note that if we leave margin empty, it’ll take the cost of services from our Profits and keep the Bid Unit Price the same. OR if we add say 20% margin to the service line items, it will increase the profit and also increase the bid unit price. You can use whichever method that works best for your specific RFQ.

Where this fits

This tutorial covers the Pricing & Bid Calculation part of Loocey DLA. Build a defensible Bid Unit Price from supplier quotes, services, margin and award history.

• Loocey DLA Getting Started guide — account setup and the full bidding workflow
• Saved-search recipes — the exact column, condition and value for 20 common DLA searches
• DLA / DIBBS glossary — what every field on a solicitation means
• All Loocey DLA video tutorials