A step-by-step guide to discovering, tracking, and qualifying public procurement opportunities. Learn the manual process and how automation can transform your workflow.
Tender discovery is the process of identifying relevant public procurement opportunities published by government agencies and public sector organizations. It involves monitoring multiple procurement portals, analyzing tender documents, and qualifying opportunities that match your business capabilities.
The challenge: Government tenders are published across hundreds of different portals worldwide, each with unique formats, languages, and submission requirements. Finding the right opportunities requires systematic monitoring and careful analysis.
The first step is identifying which procurement portals publish tenders relevant to your business. Key portals include:
European Union's official procurement portal
U.S. federal government procurement portal
UK government procurement opportunities
UK public sector procurement service
Each portal has different search interfaces, filters, and data formats. Monitoring multiple portals manually requires checking each one daily, a time-consuming process that's easy to miss opportunities.
Most procurement portals allow you to filter by multiple criteria to narrow down relevant opportunities:
Standardized classification codes (e.g., 45000000 for Construction)
Country, region, or city where work will be performed
Estimated budget range to match your business size
Recently published opportunities (e.g., last 7 days)
Once you find relevant opportunities, download the complete tender documentation. These bid packs typically include:
Detailed requirements for deliverables
Certifications, insurance, and legal criteria
Deadlines, format, and delivery instructions
How proposals will be scored and selected
Tender documents can be 100+ pages long. Reading and extracting key requirements manually takes several hours per tender, making it difficult to review multiple opportunities quickly.
Not every tender is worth pursuing. Qualification involves answering critical questions:
✓ Do we meet compliance requirements?
Check certifications, insurance levels, financial thresholds
✓ Do we have the capacity?
Team availability, technical capability, geographic reach
✓ Is the opportunity profitable?
Contract value vs. bid preparation costs and delivery costs
✓ Can we compete?
Past performance, competitive landscape, win probability
Many procurement portals offer email alerts for new tenders matching your criteria. However, manual alerts have limitations:
Generic alerts often send too many irrelevant opportunities
You still need to manually review each alert to identify relevant tenders
Alerts from different portals arrive separately, no unified pipeline
AI-powered platforms monitor all portals 24/7, analyze documents automatically, and deliver only high-relevance opportunities with Go/No-Go recommendations, eliminating manual overhead.
AI-powered tender discovery platforms automate the entire process, transforming hours of manual work into seconds of intelligent analysis:
Automatically scan TED, SAM.gov, CanadaBuys, Contracts Finder, and more, eliminating manual daily checks across multiple portals.
AI reads 100+ page bid packs and extracts key requirements, deadlines, and compliance criteria in seconds.
Compare tender requirements against your profile to identify compliance gaps and generate Go/No-Go recommendations.
Receive personalized alerts for high-potential opportunities only, reducing noise by 90% and ensuring you never miss relevant tenders.
Manual tender discovery requires daily monitoring of multiple procurement portals (TED, SAM.gov, CanadaBuys, Contracts Finder, FTS)
Use CPV codes and filters to narrow down relevant opportunities based on your industry and capabilities
Document review takes significant time, reading RFPs and extracting requirements can take hours per tender
Qualification is critical, focus on opportunities where you meet requirements and have a strong competitive position
Automation significantly reduces workload by handling portal monitoring, document analysis, and initial qualification, transforming manual hours into intelligent seconds
FAQ
Learn how TenderStria automates the tender discovery process
Explore TenderStria →Free downloadable template for evaluating tender opportunities
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