Government, municipal and other public bodies make up a substantial part of aggregate demand for products and services in a number of sectors. Energy, construction, green solutions, security and waste are just a few.

Businesses are more or less familiar with local (national) ways of tendering. Nowadays, it is rare to see the once common practice of physically publishing tenders on paper pinned to a corkboard in the lobby of ministries or other institutions (surprisingly, those times are NOT that far in the past). National and local governments now usually announce new tenders on a set of dedicated websites. For example, these are the tenders from the Ministry of Urban Development in India.

However, separate tender websites for each public institutions ministry are becoming obsolete in developed countries. Public procurement is centralised under the umbrella of one bureau or agency. See for example the Slovak Office for Public Procurement.

If your business is more specific than “office supplies” or “detergents”, the single country region is usually a too narrow playfield, especially if you operate in a small country. To expand your search for tenders, you need to discover other national tender websites. Sometimes it’s just a matter of five minutes of googling, but other less user-friendly procurement websites can take hours to crack.

Luckily, there are two or three really good global metasearch engines for public tenders. These aggregate information from dozens (in some cases even hundreds) of tendering websites and offer them in an organised and user-friendly way. We are proud to say that Tenderio integrates one of them.

Searching for tenders is the easy part of the job, however. Bidding in tenders is the (much) more difficult part, especially if you do not know the language and the local way of procurement. We will share more in the next blogpost when discussing our Tenderio network of bid writers!