3 Challenges in Online Public Procurement part 2: Lack of transparency

In this series of articles we provide an insight in the biggest online tendering issues. Although we can see an incremental increase in international governments and governmental bodies that publish their tenders online, there is still a lot to win here for 2 reasons:

  • these governments provide their information with their own specific systematics, file structure and user interface. 
  • public procurement data becomes increasingly more scattered throughout the internet. 

This creates multiple difficulties for companies searching for the right public tenders giving us 3 challenges to conquer:

  • Renewed Fragmentation
  • Lack of Transparency 
  • Absence of governmental accountability

Today we discuss our second topic of our series:

Lack of transparency

So, although public procurement data is more widely available to a bigger audience, as we have seen in the previous article Renewed fragmentation, the internet causes online public procurement data itself, to become more fragmented. After all, it results in procurement portals for every national, regional or local government body. Not to mention the semi-public institutions like health care services or fire brigades. Making searching for tenders a day job and unclear for newcomers. If new and interested companies are not able to find public tenders online, who will? The result is only the usual suspects will respond to the requests for tender. This will in many cases lead to higher prices and lower quality of the products and services procured and therefore this fact is market distorting by itself. 

It demonstrates the second challenge in the current system, which our own research supported by the European Commission and Dutch Foundation for Internet Domains (SIDN), concludes: (international oriented) Small, Medium and Micro companies experience a lack of transparency. Finding promising and suitable tenders is hard, because they simply lack the capacity and resources to search all online tender platforms.

Tender-it.com: increasing market transparency

That is actually the fuel for our idea and drive to start Tender-it.com. The lack of transparency can be solved by using the power of the internet to tackle its flaws. What do we do? We are developing our technology to bundle all online tendering platforms worldwide. It is the place to go to, actually find and win public tenders globally. The team is continuously adding new tender sources and platforms, which we make searchable online in an intelligent way and manageable via our tender management dashboard. Please do check it out under: www.tender-it.com and let us know what you think of it. If you’re interested in finding information about winners of public procurement, or want to investigate and compare tender winning information, our www.opentenders.eu project supported by the SIDN-fund might be of your interest.


Tender-it - FIND.IT.WIN.IT