What the tender feed does
The feed gathers notices from three places and puts every match in one inbox:
Before anything is matched, the notices from the registry and from your own sources are filtered for construction-related work: civil works, buildings, roads and bridges, water and drainage, energy plant and similar. The nightly search is told to look for construction tenders only. To narrow it further, list the words to exclude in your watch profile.
- A curated registry of development-bank, UN, EU, national-portal, agency and newspaper sources that Bidligence maintains, each re-read on its own schedule, from several times a day to once a day. 17 of them are switched on and have returned tender notices in the last 30 days.
- A nightly web search of the countries workspaces watch, a limited number from each workspace, run in each country's local night.
- Your own sources: a public tender page or RSS/Atom feed you add, read daily for your workspace only.
How it works
From the first visit to a bid in progress, in order:
- 1Open the Opportunities page. The first visit creates a watch profile from your company's country and region and fills the inbox with matching notices from the last 30 days.
- 2Set your watch profile. Keywords, words to exclude, countries, regions, multilateral notices, a minimum value, sources and the digest. Saving rescans recent notices, up to the last 45 days, against the new settings: the ones that now match are added, and those the rescan covers that sit in your Inbox tab and no longer match are taken out. Notices you have saved, dismissed or started a bid from stay where they are.
- 3Bidligence reads the sources. Every two hours it runs the sources that are due, checks each new notice against every watch profile and adds it to the inboxes it fits, with a match score out of 100.
- 4The nightly search runs. Between midnight and six in the morning, local time, each country on the night's list is due one search, and the results are matched like any other notice.
- 5Your digest goes out. Daily or weekly, within two hours after the hour set for your workspace, with the best new matches since the last one.
- 6You start a bid. One click turns a notice into a bid with its details filled in and opens it, ready for you to upload the tender pack.
Your watch profile: the saved search behind the feed
Each workspace keeps one watch profile, and every new notice is checked against it. A notice reaches the inbox only when it passes every filter:
Admins, bid managers, technical leads and finance members can change the profile; every member of the workspace can read the inbox.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Keywords | A notice needs at least one of them in its title, summary, buyer or sector. A keyword matches from the start of a word, so "road" finds "roads" and "roadworks" but not "broad". With no keywords, every construction notice from your countries and sources comes through. |
| Exclude keywords | A notice containing any of them, such as "consultancy" or "supply of vehicles", is dropped. |
| Countries and regions | Added together, not narrowed: a notice in any chosen country or any chosen region passes. Leave both empty, with multilateral notices off, and the feed covers everywhere. |
| Also watch multilateral notices | Adds every listing from the multilateral sources, such as the World Bank and the UN, and any notice that names no country, wherever the work is. |
| Minimum estimated value | Notices that state a lower value are left out; notices that state no value are kept. The figure is compared as written, without currency conversion. |
| Sources | Keep All sources on, or pick the registry sources you want. A pick leaves out every registry source not ticked; the sources you added yourself and the results from the nightly search of your countries still come through. |
| E-mail digest | Daily, weekly or off, for the whole workspace. |
The match score ranks the inbox. Keywords in the title count for more than keywords in a summary, and a notice in one of your chosen countries, a recent notice, a closing date with time left to price, a multilateral source and a stated value all add to it. It ranks notices; it does not tell you whether to bid.
An inbox your team works through
Every match is a row your team can act on:
- Each notice shows its match score, buyer, source, date published, any stated value with its currency, the closing date with the days left, the sector and procurement method where given, and the keywords it matched. The title opens the page the notice was found on.
- Four tabs, Inbox, Saved, Started and Dismissed, keep the pile sorted. Save the notices worth a look, dismiss the ones you will not bid, and restore a dismissed one if you change your mind.
- Search by title, buyer or summary, and filter by country or source. In the Inbox tab, notices whose closing date has passed are hidden until you switch on Show closed.
- Notices carry a new tag until they have been seen, and Mark all read clears the unread count in one go, including notices further down the list.
- Reviewers can save and dismiss; admins, bid managers, technical leads and finance members can also start bids and manage sources.
Where the notices come from
The curated registry includes development banks, UN agencies and the EU's TED, national e-procurement portals such as the UK's Find a Tender, Kenya's Public Procurement Information Portal, Brazil's PNCP and the Philippines' PhilGEPS, transport and public works agencies, and a newspaper tender page. Some publish open data that Bidligence reads directly; the others are web pages read by Bidligence's Super Intelligence.
An item read from one of the registry's web pages must carry a real tender reference or a closing date before it reaches an inbox, and an item from a newspaper page needs both plus a notice page of its own, so news stories about tenders are skipped. A source that keeps failing is paused automatically with the reason recorded, and the Sources panel shows how many sources returned notices on their last run.
The multilateral sources, from development banks and UN agencies to the EU and other international funders, that have returned notices in the last 30 days:
Sources that returned tender notices to Bidligence in the last 30 days. The list updates itself.
- World Bank — Procurement Notices
- UNDP — Procurement Notices
- TED — EU Tenders Electronic Daily (CPV 45)
- UNGM — UN Global Marketplace
The nightly sweep of the countries you watch
Many publishers have no feed and no stable listing page. So at most once a night per country, between midnight and six in the morning local time, Bidligence's Super Intelligence searches the web for open construction tenders in the countries its workspaces watch. Each workspace puts forward a limited number of countries, taken from its watch profile and then its company's own country. It is told to look at the country's own e-procurement portal and ministry pages, UNGM, World Bank notices, Asian Development Bank tender pages and similar listings.
A result is kept only when the page it cites is one the search actually returned and it carries a tender reference and a closing date, or one of the two on a recognised procurement notice page. When a curated source carries the same tender, by reference in the same country or by its notice page, Bidligence keeps one copy.
Bidligence pays for the search, not your workspace, so it runs only for countries a workspace actually watches, and a country nobody watches any more is paused. Free workspaces' countries are included; when a night's list is ranked, a Starter, Pro or Enterprise workspace watching a country counts for more than a free one. The search can cover 66 countries in all, and a watched country outside them is not searched. Among them:
- Argentina
- Australia
- Bangladesh
- Brazil
- Canada
- Chile
- Colombia
- Egypt
- Ethiopia
- France
- Germany
- Ghana
- India
- Indonesia
- Ireland
- Italy
- Jordan
- Kenya
- Kuwait
- Liberia
- Malawi
- Malaysia
- Mexico
- Morocco
- Mozambique
- Netherlands
- New Zealand
- Nigeria
- Oman
- Pakistan
- Peru
- Philippines
- Poland
- Portugal
- Qatar
- Romania
- Rwanda
- Saudi Arabia
- Senegal
- Sierra Leone
- Singapore
- South Africa
- Spain
- Sri Lanka
- Tanzania
- Thailand
- Timor-Leste
- Uganda
- Ukraine
- United Arab Emirates
- United Kingdom
- United States
- Vietnam
- Zambia
Add the portals you rely on
If a ministry, utility, council or newspaper publishes tenders on a public page that Bidligence does not list, add it from the Sources panel on the Opportunities page: a name, the address of the tender listing or RSS/Atom feed and, optionally, a country. Bidligence fetches it straight away, tells you how many notices it found on the first pass, and re-reads it daily.
Notices from a source you added go to your workspace only, and neither your country settings nor a source pick in the watch profile filters them out; your keywords, excluded words and minimum value still apply. An RSS or Atom feed is read directly and uses no credits; a web page is read by Bidligence's Super Intelligence, so reading it draws on your workspace's credits and stops while the workspace has none left.
A page that builds its tender list with JavaScript, or shows it only after sign-in, gives Bidligence nothing to read. If the tender titles are missing when you view the page's source in your browser, Bidligence will not see them either.
A digest at the hour you choose
Choose daily, weekly or off in the watch profile. The send hour and time zone are set once for the workspace in Settings, and a new workspace starts with a morning send in its own time zone, or its region's. Bidligence checks every two hours, so the digest leaves within two hours after the hour you choose.
Each digest lists the best new matches since the last one, ranked by match score, with the buyer, country, closing date, source and score, and a link to the inbox. When nothing new has matched, nothing is sent. Every member of the workspace receives it, and each person can turn their own copy off in their profile settings, which the link at the foot of every digest opens.
From notice to bid, and on through the bid desk
Start bid creates a bid from the notice and opens it: the project name from its title, the client from its buyer, its country and region, the currency it states (or the region's default), the closing date and any stated value. The source, the link to the notice and its summary go into the bid's notes, and the notice moves to the Started tab, where it opens its bid rather than creating a second one. A workspace without a plan can hold a limited number of bids, so there Start bid stops once that number is reached.
Bidligence does not download tender documents. Get the pack from the publisher, which often means registering on its portal, and upload it to the bid. From there the rest of the bid desk takes over:
- Tender analysis reads the documents you upload, and the Bid Score puts numbers behind the bid/no-bid decision.
- The notice's region sets the bid's procurement profile, and that profile's currency when the notice states none.
- The closing date carried across starts the bid's countdown in deadline tracking; when the analysis reads a closing date and time zone from the tender itself, those replace it.
- Hunter, the bid agent, can list the best-scoring open notices in your Inbox tab, by country or search term, when you ask it in a chat.
- From the analysis on, the priced BOQ and the Submission Guard work on the bid like any other.
What the feed cannot catch
No tender feed sees every tender, and Bidligence is no exception. Know the gaps before you rely on it:
- Publishers that block automated reading. Sites that refuse automated requests, draw their tender list with JavaScript or show it only after sign-in are not read directly. Their notices reach you only when the nightly search or another source finds them; development-bank tenders lists which banks block readers.
- Print-only notices. Tender notices that appear only in a printed newspaper are not read.
- Sources that fail for a while. A portal that changes its layout or goes offline returns nothing until it recovers. The Sources panel shows the last error for each source.
- Addenda and clarifications. These usually go to registered bidders on the publisher's portal rather than being advertised again. Register for every tender you pursue, and upload each addendum to the bid in Bidligence.
Treat the feed as a wide net, not the official record. The closing date, documents and rules that count are the ones in the tender itself, on the publisher's site.
Which plans include it
The feed, the watch profile, the nightly search of your countries and the digest are part of every workspace, on Free, Starter, Pro and Enterprise alike. The one difference is the ranking of the nightly search list, where a paying workspace's countries count for more. Within the feed, credits are used only when Bidligence reads a web page you added yourself.
Plans matter for what comes after a notice. A new account's free workspace gets 500 welcome credits once its e-mail is confirmed, enough to analyse a tender, get its Bid Score and see its BOQ priced, and a free workspace can hold a limited number of bids. Generating the bid documents needs Starter (US$399 a month) or Pro (US$799 a month), each starting with a 3-day free trial; RFQ packages and pipeline analytics are Pro and Enterprise. See pricing.
Questions
- Which plans include the tender feed and the digest?
- Every workspace, free ones included. The feed, the watch profile, the nightly search of your countries and the daily or weekly digest are part of Free, Starter, Pro and Enterprise alike; the one difference is that when a night's search list is ranked, a paying workspace watching a country counts for more than a free one. Generating the bid documents for a tender you find needs Starter or Pro.
- How quickly will I hear about a new tender?
- Bidligence runs the sources that are due every two hours, and each source is re-read on its own schedule, from several times a day to once a day. The nightly search runs at most once a night for each country on its list. New matches appear in your inbox as soon as they are found, and the digest goes out within two hours after the hour you choose.
- What exactly does Start bid do?
- It creates a bid with the notice's title, buyer, country, region, currency, closing date and any stated value filled in, saves the source, the notice link and its summary in the bid's notes, moves the notice to the Started tab and opens the bid. It does not download the tender documents: you get the pack from the publisher and upload it to the bid.
- Can I watch a portal that Bidligence does not list?
- Yes. Add its tender page or RSS/Atom feed in the Sources panel and Bidligence reads it daily for your workspace only. A feed uses no credits and a web page draws on your workspace's credits; pages that need a sign-in or build their list with JavaScript cannot be read.
- Does the feed include World Bank and other development-bank tenders?
- Yes, from the multilateral sources listed on this page and from the nightly search, which looks at World Bank, UNGM and Asian Development Bank pages among others. Some banks block automated reading, so their notices arrive only when another source or the search finds them.