Fixing South African Tenders Through Innovation
The current landscape of tenders has seen very little to no innovation in the last 20 years. Government procurement actioners use technologies such as paper, pen, and printers to produce tender documents, provided they can find the digital documents.
Often the only way to get access to the document is to pay a fee of R200, or more, for a printed copy of the tender documents.
There is no need for any of this. The last 20 years have shown a tremendous amount of improvement in various industries such as eCommerce, financial technology, logistics technology, etc.
Government technology is an industry that seems to not receive as much attention as the industries mentioned above. We want to change that; we plan to build several solutions that will modernise our government’s use of technology.
Our first focus point will be on tender procurement. There are several steps to getting a tender application completed, the steps are:
Find all the necessary information about a particular tender.
Download or purchase the necessary documents.
Downloading a document puts the printing costs on the bidder.
Properly fill in each document, ensuring there are no mistakes at all.
Bidders only realise their mistakes after submission.
Bind the document and ensure all supporting documents are present.
Deliver the tender package to a physical bid box at the location specified on the tender application form.
Each of the steps mentioned above is an obstacle to novice tender applicants, which leads a number of applicants to fail unnecessarily or fall prey to scams promising easy documentation completion.
We are proposing a transformation of the current landscape using the power of computers, each step of the tender process can and should be done using computers.
Currently, app.bidsstack.com handles the discovery phase of the tender process, we pull a number of tenders daily from various local government department sites. Users can browse thousands of tenders, download tender documents or save tenders for later viewing.
We are working on a way for users to receive a daily email with tenders that they would be interested in, the email will have a quick view of tenders they are interested in based on information they told us, as well as a link to the tender details page.
The longer-term plan would be to figure out how to reduce the need for physical paper when applying for tenders, this is our north star.
Solving it this way reduces the complexity that exists in the current way of doing things, improves the odds of your tender application getting selected and improves the management of applied tenders on the side of the tender reviewer.
If this is something you would be interested in, feel free to reach out to us at support@bidsstack.com or engage with our site for more information.