A specification is rarely closed on purpose. It closes through three pages written without a second thought — and the bill arrives five years later.
“Specification open to all brands” — it is there on page 2. And yet, when the tenders were opened, only one company had been able to bid.
Open does not mean multi-brand
An open tender answers two questions, not one. The first: how many companies can submit a bid today? The second, invariably forgotten: how many will be able to take this installation over in five years?
The first decides the award price. The second decides everything else: the price of the first extension, of the supervision upgrade, and the client's room for negotiation over the twenty years that follow. A tender can be perfectly competitive at bid stage and completely locked eighteen months later.
The three locks
They are almost never set deliberately. They follow from the way the tender documents were assembled.
- The functional description is lifted from a manufacturer's documentation. It keeps the vocabulary, the function names and sometimes the part numbers, followed by an “or equivalent” that nothing really equals. A competitor reading it understands within ten minutes that it would be pricing a product described by someone else, and walks away.
- The project files have no designated owner. Controller programs, ETS project, supervision database, passwords: unless the specification states that they belong to the client and are handed over at acceptance, they stay with whoever wrote them. The next company cannot take the installation over — it can only replace it.
- The licences and the engineering tool are in the integrator's name. The building runs, the supervision displays, but nobody else can get in to change anything. It is the quietest of the three locks, because it only shows when you need it gone.
For tenders under public procurement rules, a reference to a brand is admissible only where no other sufficiently precise description exists, and provided “or equivalent” is added. Almost every tender complies with that in form. It says nothing about the rest: a specification that names no brand at all can still be firmly closed by the other two locks.
The protocol is not enough
Writing “the installation shall be BACnet” guarantees nothing. BACnet, KNX and Modbus are languages; they impose neither the vocabulary, nor the level of service, nor what will actually be exposed to the supervision. Two perfectly compliant devices can be unable to work together.
What binds is the profiles. On the BACnet side, the controller profile (B-BC for a building controller) and the workstation profile (B-AWS for an advanced operator workstation) set the mandatory services. In Switzerland, the reference profiles — MBE-CH for the supervision, AS-CH for the automation stations — state the object types and properties expected for each function.
And it needs verifiable proof. That is the role of the EDE export: a standardised file listing the objects actually present in the controllers, with their name, type and properties. Required at acceptance and compared with the points list, it turns a promise of openness into a ten-minute check.
The six clauses
They fit on one page and take an hour to review. That hour is the gap between an open tender and one that merely says so.
| Clause | What to write | What it prevents |
|---|---|---|
| Protocol and profiles | Automation stations shall meet the B-BC profile and the AS-CH reference profile; the supervision the B-AWS and MBE-CH profiles. | A BACnet in name only — compliant on the label, silent on the network. |
| EDE export | A complete EDE export shall be delivered at acceptance and compared with the contractual points list. | An unverifiable handover, and points “allowed for” but never created. |
| Source files | Controller programs, ETS project, supervision database, drawings and passwords are the property of the client and are handed over at acceptance, in source and workable form. | Any other company being unable to take over. |
| Licences | Licences shall be issued in the client's name and be transferable; the engineering tool shall be available to any trained integrator. | Commercial dependence on a single supplier. |
| Naming convention | Identification shall follow the KBOB convention, applied to data points and to the supervision tree alike. | A proprietary tagging that only its author can read. |
| Functional description | Functions shall be described in the language of operation — what the installation must do — with no manufacturer-specific function names. | The implicit pre-qualification of a single brand. |
If only one were kept, it would be the source files. Two lines in the specification, no extra cost in the bid, and it alone decides whether the installation stays open to another company.
The three-company test
Before the documents go out, two questions are enough to know where you stand.
- How many companies can bid for this tender? Not how many will be invited — how many are technically and commercially able to put in a serious offer.
- How many will be able to modify the installation in five years? With the files, licences and documentation the contract provides for, and without going back to the original company.
Below three on the first question, the tender is no longer competitive. Below three on the second, it never will be again. And when the two answers differ widely, it is not competition that is missing: it is reversibility.
What changes, and when
An open specification costs no more to write. It costs one review — an hour, on a set of documents that took fifty. Nor does it dramatically cut the award price: the immediate effect of one more bidder is real but modest.
The gain shows up elsewhere, and later. At the first extension, when several companies can price the change. At the supervision upgrade, when the files exist and the naming is readable. At the end of a controller's life, when you can switch range without rebuilding the building. These are not savings you announce at the award meeting; they are the ones you notice over twenty years.
wall-i is an independent engineering office for BMS and building automation, based in Valais, Switzerland. Our specifications are open to every brand and our deliverables follow the SIA standards and the KBOB naming convention. A subject you would like us to cover: hello@wall-i.ch