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.

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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.