Caltrans Office Engineer
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Office Engineer Web Tour

This is a tutorial on how to use some of the new features on the Office Engineer website. The Office Engineer website has been re-designed with a primary focus on our serving our contractor partners, and has several features specifically geared toward helping newer contractors and small and disadvantaged businesses participate in Caltrans work. Click on any menu item to jump down to the section you're interested in.

The Contractor Information Table

One of our main collected sources of information is our Contractor Information table. It's accessible by clicking the road cone graphic on our Office Engineer page, shown here.

This table has been designed to be a "one stop shop" for all the links, informational reports, and tools that our contracting partners find most useful. Columns are used to sort the information into easy to follow categories (Advertisement information, Bid Openings, Awards, etc), and each column has a number of links with descriptions underneath them. As new tools or reports are made available, we add links under the appropriate heading.

Frequently Asked Questions

We recently added a Frequently Asked Questions page to our website to address recurring questions that continually come up in our office. Questions are categorized by Bidding, Contract Award, General, and Plans to suit the majority of contractor related questions our office receives. As policies change, or we feel that a certain topic needs clarification or deeper explanation, we try to add additional questions and answers as topics come up.

Feedback

One of the new communication features we added to our website is a feedback page where contractors or anyone else can sound off on how they think Office Engineer is doing. Rather than just email the form results to a single person, multiple staff in the office are notified of each entry, and an internal database displays all submitted questions and responses to make sure we are timely and accurate with our response. We try to handle all inquiries on the same day they are received, and each comment is taken seriously. Anonymous comments are welcome as well, and we strive to improve our service based on your feedback.

Advertised Projects

Our advertised project listing page lists all currently advertised projects, along with any future upcoming projects.

Listings are available for projects newly advertised for the current week, previously advertised projects that haven't yet bid opened, postponed projects, and then a tentative list for the upcoming week, then tentative upcoming projects in the near future.

Each project listing should have a similar format to the project shown here. The contract number, description of work, location, advertisement date, bid opening location, bid opening date, engineer's estimate, project plans title, license requirements, number of working days, DVBE requirement (if we have one), and cost per contract set will all be shown. If addenda are present on the project, a notice will also be shown.

Search Advertised Projects

We have several ways to search our advertised projects. Here are 3 different methods.

Search advertised projects by bid item

We have recently added the ability to search advertised projects by bid item on our bid item search page. Here is how it works.

First, fill in the search criteria you'd like to use. You can either search by bid item..

..or you can search by a partial description of the work to be done. The entire bid item description is not necessary, though you may enter it if you want exact results.

Click the search box and your search results will be displayed.

The results will be grouped by contract number, and you will see all items on that project that match the search query specified. From these results, you can click on the contract number to get a full listing of all items on the project, you can opt-in on the project, you can see the contract documents, or you can see the bidding or non-bidding planholders.

Search advertised projects by location

We display all currently advertised projects along with our tentative future projects on a map of California on our bid map page. Currently advertised projects are shown by little red markers, and upcoming projects are shown by blue markers. Map controls are available for zooming in and out and panning around the map. Satellite imagry is also available, as well as the traditional map view.

Project details can be found by clicking on any of the project markers. Information about the type of work to be done, location, and advertisement and bid opening dates are all shown, as well as a link to more detailed project information.

Search by bid specialty license

Contractors who do not posess a Class A license can still find and bid on a wide variety of jobs by using our specialty license search tool. Choose a specialty licence type from the list available.

The returned list of projects will all show projects in which that specific license may bid on the project as a prime. Note that sometimes a combination of C-class licenses may be necessary to bid the required portion of the work.

Addenda

We've made some changes to the way we display project addenda on our website to hopefully make things easier for contractors to track changes on the projects they're bidding on.

Browse Addenda

We have re-designed our addenda page to show addenda in an easy-to-follow design. The addenda page shows all currently advertised projects which have addenda, sorted and grouped by project number, with a direct link to download and view the addenda. All addenda for each project are listed below the contract number, along with the issue date, the method it was sent, and the purpose of the addenda. For non-plan holders, the link to download the addenda will provide you with the exact information that is mailed to or faxed to planholders.

Addenda Feed

An RSS feed for addenda is available for those that wish to make use of this service. Using one of the many available RSS reader programs or websites available, you will receive a live feed of any new addenda notifications as soon as they are issued. You can even use various web services to have the notifications emailed to you.

Addenda in advertised projects

Whenever a project has one or more addenda, the standard advertised project listings will show that in red, along with a link to the project. This ensures that contractors browsing our advertised listings will know what addenda are available immediately, when considering bidding on a project.

Planholders and opt-in

We made changes this year to the planholders system that makes searching and viewing your data easier than ever.

Search for planholders

Our planholder search page has been designed to allow flexibility during searches to give you the exact results you want. You can do the usual search where you want to see what contractors have picked up a bidding set for a certain contract. Or you can only fill in the contractor name field and see what projects ABC Construction is looking at. Or you can see all planholders for a certain bid opening date. The more fields you fill in, the more detailed your search results will be.

The search result page gives you the information you're looking for, including contact information should you wish to do business with the contractors listed. It also tells you what each contractor ordered, whether it was a bid package, a non-bid package, or both. This page has also been designed to print out on your computer.

Search for opt-in participants

A new feature we added that allows contractors to participate in the bidding process without picking up a plan set is our opt-in process. Opt-in participants can be found from our same planholder search page. The opt-in section is lower on the page. Opt-in participants are allowed to enter their disadvantaged status, as well as services they offer or materials they supply, so those are also searchable fields. Along with the contract number, you can choose to search for DVBE contractors offering a certain service, or you can search for opt-in particpants in district 3 only by entering 03- for the contract number, and entering search results in the services field or disadvantaged checkboxes to match your needs.

Opt-in search results will give you the contractor information, contact information, their disadvantaged status, and the services they offer.

Use the opt-in service

The opt-in service is for contractors who want to be considered as subcontractors or suppliers for a project, but do not want or need to pick up a set of contract plans from our plans counter. As an added bonus, these contractors have the option to give our their disadvantaged status, as well as a list of services and materials they offer. Adding yourself to the opt-in list is easy to do. On the advertised project list, each project has a link to opt-in, as shown here.

The opt-in page gives you several pieces of information to fill out, your contact information, disadvantaged status (if any), and the services you offer. There are no rules on how to fill in your information, just describe what services or materials you offer, and bidding contractors will see what you can do.

Review your information. If everything looks good, you're done. If you feel you've made a mistake in your entry, you can delete your record and try again.

 

 

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