How to Write a Tender Case Study: A Practical Guide

A strong tender case study does more than tell a buyer that you have delivered a successful contract before. It gives them evidence that your organisation has the experience, capability and processes needed to deliver the requirement in front of them.

That sounds straightforward, but good experience can still produce a weak case study. Choosing an impressive but irrelevant project, relying on vague claims or describing what you did without showing the result can all make it harder for an evaluator to award marks. The strongest examples are selected carefully, supported by evidence and written around what the buyer actually wants to assess.

What is a tender case study?

A tender case study is an example of previous delivery used to demonstrate your organisation’s relevant experience and capability. Depending on the procurement, the buyer may be interested in your:

• experience delivering similar goods, works or services;
• ability to manage contracts of a comparable size or complexity;
• technical approach;
• mobilisation and contract management;
• problem-solving ability;
• performance against KPIs or service levels;
• measurable outcomes.

This makes a tender case study different from a marketing case study. Marketing content can prioritise an engaging story and the overall success of a project. In a tender, the evaluator needs evidence that helps them answer a more specific question: does this example demonstrate that the bidder can meet our requirement?

Scottish Government guidance on technical and professional ability confirms that buyers can request evidence of a supplier’s skills, efficiency, experience and reliability when assessing whether it has the capability to deliver a contract.

Where do case studies appear in tenders?

You may be asked for previous contract examples at different stages of a procurement.

Selection-stage experience

A buyer may ask you to demonstrate relevant experience as part of the selection process.

For Scottish procurement, references from contracts performed during the previous three years for goods and services and five years for works can be used as evidence of suitable experience.

Depending on the procedure, technical and professional ability questions within the SPD can sometimes be scored and weighted to shortlist suppliers. The Scottish Procurement Journey explains how SPD selection questions can be evaluated and stresses that the methodology must be transparent and explained to bidders in advance.

Scored tender questions

Case studies can also support quality responses at the award stage. For example, you may be asked to demonstrate how you have previously:

• mobilised a complex service;
• managed operational risks;
• improved performance;
• introduced innovation;
• delivered social or environmental benefits;
• worked with multiple stakeholders.

In this situation, the case study is not simply an account of a previous contract. It is evidence supporting your answer to the current question.

Scottish procurement guidance requires tender questions to be consistent with the published evaluation criteria and weightings, so your example should always be shaped around what the buyer has chosen to evaluate.

How to choose the right case study

Choosing the example should come before writing it. When reviewing your previous contracts, consider five tests.

The biggest or most prestigious contract is not automatically your strongest case study. A £500,000 contract closely matching the buyer’s requirement can provide far better evidence than a £10 million project involving completely different services and delivery conditions.

Nor does a case study always need to match the new contract exactly. Look for transferable similarities such as scale, mobilisation, regulatory requirements, stakeholder groups, geography or performance measures. Scottish procurement guidance makes clear that a supplier should not necessarily be excluded simply because it has not previously delivered exactly the same goods, works or services.

Your wider bid strategy should therefore include understanding the markets you want to target and building an evidence library around the experience most likely to support those opportunities.

Scottish statutory guidance also makes an important point for businesses entering new markets: a supplier that can demonstrate the required capacity and capability should not necessarily be excluded simply because it has not delivered exactly the same goods, works or services previously.

What information should you gather before writing?

Once you have chosen your example, gather the evidence before drafting. Useful information could include:

• Contract details: client, dates, value, scope, locations and scale of delivery.
• Requirements: the client’s objectives, KPIs or SLAs, key risks and operational challenges.
• Your delivery: the team involved, your approach, controls, improvements and any changes made during the contract.
• Results: performance against targets, cost or efficiency savings, added value and any social value or community benefits delivered.
• Supporting evidence: reports, certificates, client feedback, screenshots, photographs or other records that substantiate your claims.
• Reference details: an appropriate client contact who knows the contract and, where required, can verify your performance.

Not every tender will require all of this. Having the information available means you can choose the details that best answer the question instead of trying to reconstruct a contract from memory two days before submission.

This is also why we encourage businesses to maintain a central evidence library. Capture performance figures, client feedback and supporting evidence during delivery or soon after the contract ends, while the information is still easy to verify.

Six steps for writing a strong tender case study

Once the evidence is ready, a simple structure can help you turn it into a focused response.

1. Establish the contract context

Give the evaluator enough information to understand why the example is relevant. That may include the client type, contract duration, value, geographic coverage and scale of delivery.

For example:

We delivered a three-year facilities management contract for a Scottish local authority covering 42 operational sites and approximately 1,200 service requests per month.

This establishes relevance quickly. You do not need several paragraphs describing the client’s history before getting to the evidence.

2. Explain the requirement

What did your client need you to achieve? Focus on the aspects that relate most closely to the current tender, such as demanding response times, multiple locations, complex mobilisation, regulatory requirements or high service volumes. This gives context to the solution that follows.

3. Describe what you did

This will usually be the most substantial part of the case study. Explain your methodology rather than simply stating that you delivered successfully. Consider:

Who was responsible?
What actions did they take?
When did activity happen?
How did you control quality and risk?
How was performance measured?

Our bid and proposal writing support focuses heavily on turning operational knowledge into this kind of evaluator-friendly evidence.

Avoid generic statements such as: “We worked closely with the client throughout mobilisation.” Instead, explain how that collaboration operated. Did you hold weekly mobilisation meetings? Maintain a joint risk register? Appoint a dedicated contract manager? Provide dashboard reporting? Specificity makes the evidence credible.

4. Show how you managed challenges

A project does not have to have been completely trouble-free to make a good case study. In fact, a genuine challenge can demonstrate capabilities that a straightforward success story cannot. That might include changing requirements, unexpected demand, shorter mobilisation timescales, staffing pressures or a new regulatory requirement.

Explain the issue objectively, what you did in response and how the risk was controlled. The emphasis should remain on your capability, not on dramatising the problem.

5. Quantify the outcome

Evidence is strongest when the buyer can measure it. Compare these two statements:

The second gives the evaluator something tangible.

Depending on the contract, useful measures might include KPI achievement, response times, cost savings, customer satisfaction, complaint levels, safety performance or environmental outcomes. Only use figures you can substantiate.

If a tender response contains strong operational detail but lacks proof, an independent bid review and comment can help identify where additional case studies, data or supporting evidence would strengthen the submission.

6. Make the relevance explicit

Do not make the evaluator work out why your example matters.

Finish by connecting the case study directly to the current requirement.

For example:

This contract demonstrates our ability to mobilise a geographically dispersed service, manage high-volume reactive demand and maintain performance against strict response-time KPIs.

That final sentence converts historical information into evidence for the current bid.

Evidence beats adjectives

Tender responses frequently rely on words such as excellent, robust, effective, successful, experienced and high quality. There is nothing inherently wrong with those words, but they become much stronger when the evidence proves them.

You are no longer asking the evaluator to accept that your performance was successful. You are showing them why.

What if you cannot name the client?

Confidentiality can occasionally prevent you from identifying a client publicly. If the tender permits an anonymised example, provide enough context for the evaluator to understand it. For example, “a Scottish local authority serving approximately 150,000 residents” is much more informative than “a confidential client”.

However, always check the procurement requirements first. If the buyer requires a contactable reference, contract name or other identifying information, anonymising the project may mean your example does not satisfy the question.

Can you reuse tender case studies?

Yes, but it is better to reuse the evidence than reuse the entire response. Your central case study might contain all of the factual information about a project. For one tender, you may emphasise mobilisation. For another, you may focus on innovation or stakeholder management.

The underlying evidence remains the same, but the response changes because the question changes. This approach saves time without falling into the trap of submitting the same generic case study to every buyer.

Common tender case study mistakes

Watch particularly for:

1. Choosing an impressive but irrelevant project
2. Using too much of the word count on background information
3. Describing activity without showing outcomes
4. Making claims or quoting figures without evidence
5. Failing to explain your organisation’s role
6. Using examples outside the permitted reference period
7. Assuming the evaluator will understand why the example is relevant

A technically accurate case study can still score poorly if it does not make the required evidence easy to identify.

A simple tender case study example

Here is a compact structure you can adapt.

Contract: Three-year responsive maintenance contract for a Scottish public body, covering 35 operational properties.

Requirement: Mobilise within six weeks and provide a 24/7 reactive service with a two-hour emergency response target.

Approach: We appointed a dedicated contract manager, mapped engineer coverage against all sites, established an out-of-hours rota and introduced live job tracking and weekly performance reporting.

Challenge: During mobilisation, five additional properties were added to the contract with no extension to the go-live date.

Response: We reassessed resource requirements, added two engineers to the regional rota and completed site surveys for the additional properties within seven working days.

Result: All 40 properties went live on schedule. During the first 12 months, 98.4% of emergency jobs met the two-hour response target against a contractual KPI of 95%.

Relevance: This demonstrates our ability to mobilise multi-site services within short timescales, adapt to changing scope and maintain performance against demanding response KPIs.

The details will vary by procurement, but the principle remains the same: context, action, evidence and relevance.

Tender case study FAQs

How long should a tender case study be?

Follow the buyer’s word, character or page limit where one is provided. There is no universal ideal length. Use enough detail to provide the evidence requested without filling the response with unnecessary background.

How many case studies should I include?

Provide the number requested by the buyer. More examples do not automatically make the answer stronger, particularly if they reduce the space available to explain your most relevant evidence.

Can I use a subcontractor’s experience?

Potentially. Whether and how you can rely on another organisation’s experience depends on the procurement structure and requirements. Check the tender documents carefully and disclose the relationship in the required way.

Should I include client references?

Where requested, yes. Check that the contact information is current and, ideally, make the referee aware that the buyer may approach them.

Turn past performance into stronger tender evidence

Previous contracts can provide some of the strongest evidence in a tender, but only if you select and present them effectively. Choose relevant examples, gather factual evidence and make the connection to the current requirement clear.

At AM Bid, we help suppliers develop stronger case studies and turn operational experience into evaluator-focused tender responses. If you need bid writing support in Scotland, we can support individual responses, review an existing submission or manage a larger part of your tender.

Speak to AM Bid about your next opportunity and we can help make sure your previous experience is presented clearly and convincingly.