To find public tenders, it is necessary to monitor and scour the internet for published opportunities. You need to open accounts on tendering web sites and often incur fees for acquiring the specifications and addenda.
Tender notices are easy to find, they are available on many websites and are easily accessible. Opportunities are classified by categories (there are several ways to categorize goods and services, the Internal Trade Agreement managing the electronic display of tenders in Canada allows each government level to establish which system they will use); using the right keywords, one can certainly find suitable opportunities. However, the difficulty lies in the fact that tender notices are often grouped by issuing authorities, such as provinces, states, or by aggregators that partially or fully replicate opportunities from other websites. The original documents and addenda are not copied, and you will need to return to the site where the tender originated; further, this link to the opportunity is often not provided. Tender listing sites engage in a real technological war to prevent copying of information on tenders from one site to another, and the bots are becoming increasingly efficient.
You will notice that many sites warn suppliers that to submit a bid, you must have obtained the documents in your name, from your account, on the site where the tender is published. This is essential, for your submission to be valid, you must have received all the addenda; otherwise, you may have missed important changes resulting in an incomplete submission. For legal reasons, you must have received and considered all addenda attached to the opportunity you wish to bid on.
To search for tenders effectively, you must understand that legitimate opportunities are those that include official documents. You need to geographically target the sites of final buyers, where original documents and addenda are published. You must read all new opportunities published daily so as not to miss anything (regardless of the categories, which are often incorrect) and you need to test each site’s alert tools offered to see if they would suit you. Additionally, you need to check the frequency of publications and above all, carefully monitor the words used to create effective alerts. You guessed it, you will end up with a list of sites to search manually and several alert emails to read, not to mention the more in-depth reading of the most interesting opportunities. Finally, review and identify the gaps observed in the process and find the means to achieve suitable monitoring anyway. You can reread all the new opportunities published, note those that were not captured by your email alerts, and adjust your filter until you are confident in capturing the right opportunities without too many false positives. A company should always keep precise records of the information on the websites monitored and the method used to find opportunities. This allows a replacement to take over the work at any time, particularly in the case of staff turnover, to ensure that no opportunities are missed during an absence.
It is crucial to understand that this process requires considerable time and effort. To be effective, this monitoring must be actively maintained according to a rigorously respected schedule. Without continuous and disciplined updating, monitoring efforts quickly become futile.