Tenders Direct is a leading provider of public sector tender alerts and bid support services. For 30 years, we have been helping customers find and win public sector contracts by delivering accurate, relevant and timely information about tendering opportunities.
I am a Tender Review Specialist for Tenders Direct and have been with the company for 28 years. In this post, I provide you with details about our Peer Review Process – the reason we can provide the most accurate alerts.
Tenders Direct has been helping businesses find and win tenders for over 30 years. Over that time, our process of finding and reviewing tenders has evolved to meet the changing needs of our customers and the tendering landscape.
In the early years, Tenders Direct only had to search the OJEU for tenders, which was a physical journal in 1993, before being digitised in the 00s. There was also no requirement for the UK or Ireland to publish below threshold tenders, meaning there were far fewer tenders available than there are today.
Our team of reviewers would manually read every single tender to identify opportunities relevant to our customers’ needs. This was a time-consuming process, but it was necessary to ensure that customers didn’t miss out on any opportunities. To improve efficiency and accuracy, our team developed their own category system, and the associated reviewing process is still the backbone of Tenders Direct today.
There are many more sources of tender notices available now than there were in the 90s. We now search hundreds of different websites for tenders, including government websites, private sector websites, and trade association websites. This means we have more tenders than ever to review, and over the years the amount of content in tenders has also increased – meaning we have a LOT of information to process.
Instead of two or three lines there can be several paragraphs of content, authorities can add a lot of irrelevant content to the requirement of the tender, but it still has to be read and reviewed. Thankfully Tenders Direct created bespoke software to complement the category system we developed – helping us to quickly identify key information in each tender.
You might think totally automated tender reviewing systems would be more efficient with such vast quantities of data, but in reality, they do not provide an acceptable level of accuracy. Restrictive search queries or overly broad parameters, with no consideration for keyword context, lead to irrelevant tender alerts and only confirm that our role as reviewers is just as important as it was in 1993.
We regularly review our processes and procedures to ensure that we are using the most efficient and effective methods possible. We also listen to our customers’ feedback and use it to make improvements to our service.
We are committed to providing the best possible tender alert service, and plan to add more search categories to our database soon. This will ensure we cover all of the latest industry trends and developments – helping customers to better access the most relevant tendering opportunities.
In the future, artificial intelligence (AI) will likely be implemented to help us review tenders even more efficiently – but you will have to wait for more information about that!