AI Tender Screening for a Supplier to Public Sector Institutions

The Challenge

A company supplying public sector institutions followed tenders and procurement announcements to find new opportunities. Its business development teams, bid teams, sales managers and public sector sales teams needed to pick out the opportunities that suited the company from a large number of announcements. The volume made it difficult to give every announcement the same careful attention.

Each tender or call for bids had to be reviewed by hand to judge whether it was a good fit, looking at its scope, any indications of budget, technical requirements, location and deadline. As a result, suitable opportunities could be missed, and the time spent screening ones that were not relevant was time taken away from preparing bids.

The Solution

With cognipeer Studio, our team configured an AI screening workflow for the company’s tender tracking process. The workflow collected new tenders and procurement announcements from the sources the company had specified, bringing them into one place for screening.

Each announcement was then pre-screened against the company’s criteria, including scope, budget indications, technical requirements, location and submission deadline. Those that appeared suitable were listed for the relevant team with a short summary and the reasons they had passed the pre-screening. The summary gave the team the essentials of each opportunity, and the reasons showed which criteria it met. The teams reviewed the list and decided which tenders to pursue, with the workflow narrowing the field rather than making the bid decision.

Implementation

1. Connected the tender sources. The workflow gathered new tenders and procurement announcements from the sources the company specified.
2. Set the screening criteria. We configured pre-screening around scope, budget indications, technical requirements, location and deadline.
3. Configured summaries with reasons. For each suitable announcement, the workflow prepared a short summary and explained why it was a match.
4. Listed opportunities for the team. Suitable tenders were listed for the relevant team with their summaries and reasons, and the team decided which ones to bid for.

Business Impact

Tender screening moved from a manual review of every announcement to a focused list of candidates. Teams spent less time searching for opportunities and could turn their attention to suitable tenders sooner, with a short summary and the reasons for each match set out in front of them. Because the first pass had already been made, bid preparation could start from a clearer view of each opportunity and became more efficient.

• Less time spent screening tenders and calls for bids.
• Faster focus on suitable tenders, with the reasons set out for each.
• More efficient bid preparation for the teams involved.
• Bid decisions retained by the team, which reviewed each listed tender before deciding whether to pursue it.

Technology Behind the Solution