RE: City of Toronto City Services Benefit Card - U " Cost is NOT the sole factor believe it or not for companies winning contracts. If that was the case no government organization would be running SAP (www.sap.com) as their main information system!"
I can agree with this 100 %, from my experience with provincial government RFP and RFQ's.
In some cases the criteria for scoring any proposal was as high 60 % corporate rating and 40 % price.
And yes, some times we did take a long time.