helmdocs-proposal-system/corpus/friendship-pcs/NOTES.md

# Friendship PCS — extraction notes

Text extracted with pdfjs 4.10.38 (line-grouped by y-position). 52pp, 105,154
chars, **no page needed OCR** — the text layer is clean throughout.

Raw output in `extracted/`. This is a reading aid for authoring, *not* the
production pipeline's output — that runs through Document AI and is what gets
measured later.

## The rubric is real and nested three deep

Verbatim from Section K.2, "Technical Rating Scale":

```
Pricing                                          40
  Total Bid Cost (Base Year)                     (no separate points)
Method of Approach and Implementation            30
  Food and Packaging                             15
  Utilization of USDA Foods                      10
  Geographic preference                           5
Bidder's Experience, Expertise & Reliability     20
  Knowledge of USDA / District requirements       5
  Dependability                                   5
  Inspection of warehouse and facilities          5
  Customer Service                                5
Proven Organizational Capacity                    5
  (three sub-bullets, NO points)
Community Connection, Values Alignment            5
  (three sub-bullets, NO points)
```

Matches what #22 recorded. Two structural facts it did not capture:

**Sub-items are inconsistent.** Under Method of Approach and Experience they are
*weighted sub-criteria* summing to the parent. Under Organizational Capacity and
Community Connection they are *unweighted guidance*. The same visual nesting
means two different things in one document.

**Geographic preference embeds a mandatory submission inside a scored
criterion:** "Bidder must submit certification of percentage of locally grown or
raised foods." A scored criterion carrying a pass/fail artifact.

## Extraction hazards confirmed here

**The rubric never uses the word "criteria" as a heading.** It lives under
"SECTION K: Evaluation Factors" → "K.2 Technical Rating Scale", with weights as
bullet suffixes (`– 40 points`). A keyword search for "evaluation criteria" or
"scoring" returns nothing. First-pass evidence for why #16's completeness sweep
cannot rely on headings.

**Schedule C is the price sheet and contains no prices.** Verbatim, the entire
section body is:

> SCHEDULE C: PRICING SHEET
> *Separate attachment to be completed in Excel.

This is #22's second extraction hazard in its purest form: a PDF-only extractor
finds **zero pricing** on a solicitation where pricing is 40% of the score. It is
also a ready-made **labelled known-miss** for the sweep — the obligation is
present, its content is not, and no amount of better PDF parsing recovers it.

## Obligation density

149 × "shall", 64 × "must" across 52 pages. An earlier ad-hoc extraction reported
zero of each; that was the extractor failing, not the document.

---

# Response set

Three synthesized responses in `responses/source/`, each paired with a truth
file. Designed so the field has a real outcome rather than three
interchangeable bids.

| Vendor | Binding | Price | Gates | Distinguishing feature |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Potomac Provisions | tabbed compliance matrix | $589,970 | PASS | Complete; volume-banded pricing; 18% local |
| Chesapeake Food Service | free prose, no anchors | $541,280 | **FAIL** | Cheapest and disqualified; unlabelled exception |
| Anacostia Farm Collective | named sections + enumeration | $624,315 | PASS | 61% local; three labelled exceptions; seasonal pricing |

The lowest bid is disqualified and the highest bid is strongest on the
criterion the SFA wrote into its own rubric. That is deliberate: a ranking
that cannot represent absence puts Chesapeake first.

## Deliberate traps

**Planted arithmetic error (Potomac).** The stated base-year total is
$589,970; band price times scenario volume is $589,570. A $400 gap. #15
decision 2 puts all price arithmetic in code precisely so a stated total is
never trusted over a computed one — this is the case that catches an
extractor lifting the vendor's own figure.

**Unverifiable total (Chesapeake).** The case price exists only in the
external Excel sheet, so no computed total can be produced at all. Contrast
Potomac, where the arithmetic can be checked and fails.

**Unlabelled exception (Chesapeake).** A price-relief request phrased as
politeness inside the Pricing section, with no heading and no delta.
Anacostia's three exceptions are explicitly headed with deltas and act as
the control.

**Non-priceable exception (Anacostia, EX-3).** If declined, the vendor
cannot bid produce at all — a conditional withdrawal expressed as an
exception. A price-delta field cannot hold it.

**Answered-but-negative (Anacostia).** "We are not currently an approved
USDA Foods processor." Squarely answers the requirement; the substance is a
disclosure of inability. Coverage and quality are orthogonal, and a system
that scores this like Potomac's 340,000 lbs is broken.

**Three certifications in one sentence (Chesapeake).** Attachments B, C and
D are satisfied by a single clause naming all three. A per-requirement
extractor must split one span three ways.

## Finding: a gate that no response document can satisfy

`R-B6C` — "Two bid copies submitted" — is a physical submission fact.
Potomac happens to assert it; the other two do not, and no better extraction
would change that. Coverage over it is neither answered nor not_answered but
**unknowable from the artifact**.

Surfaced by `validate-responses.py`, not by design. Treating it as
not_answered would disqualify two of three bidders over a packaging detail.
Raised against #10.