With the introduction of the HOAI 2021 (Honorarordnung für Architekten und Ingenieure), the fees for planning services are no longer bound to a fixed framework, which obviously leads to problems and quality losses in the implementation of contracts.

Thus, 18% of the respondents stated that the price had been the decisive criterion for the award of the contract in over 90% of their submitted bids. For 64% of the respondents, the price criterion was decisive in over 70% of the bids submitted. 52% of the survey participants also stated that the potential clients had expected a price reduction below the base rates.

The possibility of flat-rate discounts resulted in price reductions of around 30% below the base rates on several occasions.

On top of that, for many of the respondents the award processes are not very transparent. 82% of the respondents state that they have not to receive sufficient justification for their rejection. This is certainly one reason why around 78% of respondents consider it rather useful to publish the evaluation and decision matrix in the public procurement procedures.

The public contracting authorities are called upon to make improvements. The result of the survey cannot be understood in any other way. After all, the effort required to process the bids is not small. 83% of the engineers state that the effort required for the award procedures is rather inadequate or must be rated as much too high.

Surprisingly, the digitalisation of the award procedures is to blame for the increased effort. Actually intended as a simplification, electronic awarding apparently has the opposite effect.