The role of a Bid Manager in modern procurement
Bid Managers sit at the centre of public procurement for most SMEs. They're responsible for finding the right opportunities, coordinating stakeholders, and making sure every bid meets strict deadlines and rules. It's a mix of sales, project management, and compliance... all compressed into daily deadlines.
While procurement has moved online, the Bid Manager's workday still involves juggling emails, spreadsheets, and half-digital workflows. They connect legal, financial, and delivery teams, often acting as the only person who sees the whole picture.
What a Bid Manager actually does?
A Bid Manager's day usually starts with scanning tender alerts and ends with chasing documents. In between, they coordinate search multiple portals, filter shortlist and review potential bids, work with finance teams to check eligibility and capacity, prepare and upload documentation before deadlines.
Each of these steps is critical and each is time-intensive.
Why their job matters?
Public procurement depends on competition. Every qualified bid adds value to the process. Yet, when Bid Managers spend hours searching instead of bidding, the whole market suffers. Efficient tender management doesn't just help one company win; it strengthens the procurement ecosystem by increasing participation and quality.
"The role deserves modern tools and processes, but for now, most Bid Managers start their day the same way it started over a decade ago: opening yet another portal."
Morning: The search begins, still one portal at a time
For most Bid Managers, mornings start with a routine that hasn't changed in over a decade. They open multiple tabs, TED, national portals, regional sites, sector-specific platforms, and begin the search.
Each portal has its own login, structure, and rules. A few offer basic filters or saved searches, but most require manual digging. As stated in intro, the European Commission reports that there are more than 2,000 different procurement portals across Europe. That means thousands of systems to navigate, each designed slightly differently, often in different languages.
Fragmented portals and endless logins
Finding tenders should be simple, one search, one platform, one dashboard. Instead, the EU's commitment to transparency created a maze of unconnected systems.
Instead of automation, Bid Managers rely on persistence.
Transparency turned into complexity
Transparency was meant to help suppliers and in theory, it does. Every opportunity is public. But the volume and fragmentation make access harder, not easier.
The European Court of Auditors has warned that excessive complexity and inconsistent publication standards create barriers for SMEs. More data exists than ever before, but it's scattered and inconsistent.
By mid-morning, a Bid Manager has already spent hours searching, and the day has barely begun.
Midday: The filtering battle
By midday, most Bid Managers have found dozens of tenders, far too many to review in depth. The next task is to filter them down to a manageable list.
That sounds simple. In practice, it's another exercise in frustration. Each portal uses a different interface, different categories, and different search logic. Filters that work in one system fail in another. Some allow precise searches by CPV code, value, or region; others only accept keywords.
"Advanced search" isn't advanced?
Despite their name, "advanced" filters often aren't. Many portals rely on outdated taxonomies or incomplete tagging. Others require users to enter the same criteria repeatedly because saved searches don't sync.
Bid Managers try to build consistency on their own - tracking CPV codes in Excel, setting browser bookmarks, or maintaining internal cheat sheets. What should be a data-driven task becomes a manual process of elimination.
"The real KPI: Relevance, not volume"
A study by the OECD noted that inefficiency in procurement processes often stems from "excessive data without structured filtering". For SMEs, every irrelevant tender reviewed is time that could have been spent preparing a winning bid.
By now, our Bid Manager has a shortlist, but it's messy. And the alerts from the morning are starting to pile up.
Afternoon: Alerts, emails, and Excel chaos
The afternoon begins not with writing or reviewing proposals, but with notifications. Bid Managers switch between inboxes, dashboards, and spreadsheets, trying to keep track of what's new and what's urgent.
Tender alerts are supposed to simplify discovery. Instead, they often add another layer of noise.
Alerts that arrive too late
In many systems, alerts are sent in batches once or twice a day. By the time a new opportunity reaches the inbox, competitors might already be preparing a bid.
The Path Forward: AI-Powered Transformation
AI Aggregation & Normalization
Centralize notices so teams search once, not across dozens of portals. AI handles the complexity of different formats and standards automatically.
Smart Relevance Scoring
AI understands your business profile and qualification requirements. Only opportunities that match your capabilities reach your team,reducing noise by 85-90%.
Unified Collaboration Platform
Replace brittle spreadsheets with a structured pipeline that tracks status, owners and documents. Every team member works from the same source of truth.