Tenders Direct has always been at the forefront of understanding customer needs – developing new products and features to meet expectations and adapt to an evolving market. 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 the Head of Products & Projects for Tenders Direct, and in this post, I share Tenders Direct’s plans for the future.
Our team has become more proactive to changing our products in recent years, with the goal of improving the pace of innovation and pre-empting customer needs. Since joining Proactis in 2016, Tenders Direct has been able to share best practices and align product functionality with other Proactis products, harnessing the strengths and abilities across a wide range of departments.
Even with a forward-thinking mindset, there will always be new developments and unexpected challenges. A notable recent challenge was updating our system in line with the OJEU’s new eForms – which required a significant amount of effort and coordination with numerous EU government organisations. Our development team was able to successfully implement the changes before the new format went live, and customers were able to enjoy a seamless transition.
We have embedded a culture of innovation within Tenders Direct by setting up an innovation team to support our product development strategy. One of the workstreams currently being explored by this team is how to work with notices in different languages, and helping our customers access more opportunities from across the EU.
The innovation team is composed of cross-departmental individuals, bringing diverse skills, knowledge and perspectives to our product innovation process.
We have ambitious goals for improving and expanding our tender notice features. One of the main activities for the next 12-18 months is to prepare and adapt for new notice types being published on Find a Tender. These new notices will come in place with the Transforming Public Procurement Bill, and will share more information in various new formats. The work we have to carry out is beyond replacing existing notices with new ones, and involves creating new processes to enhance our services for customers.
Following on from this, we are working on finding new ways to improve customer efficiency and success in assessing and responding to tender opportunities. We also plan to evolve our tender alert service in the coming years, by offering more self-service options for customers with greater experience and knowledge.