As a budding SME, you are always working hard towards growing your business; but when it comes to looking at big contracts like government tenders or private tenders; you feel that maybe you are not big enough to apply for government tenders. As an SME, at times you are also not aware of a lot of small things about bidding for these government tenders, which further makes it look very complicated and out of your reach.

So you end up going back home exactly with the same amount of information that you had woken up with, in the morning. You end your day thinking that tomorrow is going to be different, and you will focus and dedicate some time for this; talk to your friends, family or dedicate some time aside to understand; in detail about this entirely complicated process of e-submission of government tenders.

That is why to simplify this entire process; we have crafted a very simple overview and a stepwise manual for you to keep handy with yourself.

To make it simple for us to remember, It’s a 3 steps process:

  • Discover the right opportunity for your company
  • Get an online login & apply for government tenders
  • Mark the tender award date & track it for the result

    1. Discover the right opportunity for your company

This is the most important and crucial step of all, as there will always be thousands of new and relevant opportunities every day. Once you have understood and implemented this step in your tender search, it will save you a lot of time going forward. You must know that, you can’t be competing for all the government tenders that you find while searching for it online or offline. It’s a pure waste of time and money both. Applying for all the government tenders that come your way, just because they are somewhat related to your company’s business, clearly will not be helping you in winning the government tender. You will only get exhausted and frustrated both, and that too very soon, because you don’t have a clarity as to how should you approach this entire bidding process for government tenders.

In India there are 7000+ government authorities – which publish government tenders; for instance Indian railways, NHAI, PWD, MES and many more. While most of the new government tenders get published on few of the government websites, but it may not contain the government tender from the authority that you might be looking for.

A better alternative to this may be; to subscribe to any of the tender aggregation websites like tendersinfo, tendertiger, tender247 or BidAssist. BidAssist is one of the most comprehensive aggregators which curate tender information from all government authorities and makes it as easy as google search, to discover new tenders. While tender247 or tendertiger or any other aggregation website charges you certain amount of fee for the regions and keywords that you select; BidAssist lets you discover government tenders across all regions and as many keywords you want, absolutely FREE of cost. BidAssist also helps you to do an advanced search with filters like preferred regions, tender value, tender authority and specific keywords like metal, fabrication, steel etc.

Subscribing to an online tender AGGREGATION PLATFORM ensures easy discovery of new and relevant government tenders

Now that you have started receiving the tenders information that are relevant to your business, the next step is to get more information on government tenders that are open and more importantly even the awarded government tenders, whereby the buyers have awarded it to SMEs.

This is a very important check, since those Buyers in future also may be interested in working with the SMEs. Start compiling these information for future use. Keep a close track on those buyers, and when would they release a government tender in future.

Shortlist the government tenders you want to bid for; on basis of heat map between your company and tender requirements:

  • If they have set certain clear guidelines like having past audited books of 3 or 5 years mandatory, please be sure that you fall under that; else drop those government tender options all together.
  • Map the tender size with your business turnover. If the tender size is 25% or more than your company’s annual turnover, then drop it. Buyer will anyway not choose you in that case, as they don’t want you to compromise on the service quality due to the size of their contract.
  • Try to pick those government tenders only, where the tender requirement matches with the area of your business’s core competencies, and not those elements which may be a very small portion of your business, as this will majorly reduce your chances of winning. It’s always good to have client references also shown along with.
  • Collaboration is another good way to compete, in case you feel that for certain aspects of the tender requirement, you may want to involve another SME while bidding. This will increase your chances of getting higher score in the buyers testing parameters.
  • Meeting the tender submission deadline is of course the most critical activity. This is where building your tender library becomes very important.

What’s a tender library!

A tender library typically consists of all important paper works pertaining to your company and business. Things like industry certifications, client testimonials, references, Teams CVs/professional bio data, purchases orders etc..

You must keep updating this library/folder online with latest information/updates. Your teams CVs/professional bio data must consist of the work that relates to your business’s core competencies and highlights their expertise and experience in doing that work.

Being an SME, are you afraid of bidding for government tenders?

As an SME, you may imagine that you are not big enough to be able to bid for the government tenders. Not having a large annual turnover makes you think that your company won’t even be considered in the bidding process by the buyer. This clearly is a misconception at large, because the factual data says otherwise.

Indian government has recently declared that the start-ups will be exempted from certain regulations while bidding for government tenders.

For starters, the Start-ups don’t need any prior experience to be able to compete for a government tender.

As an SME, consider the following criteria for availing the exemption:

  • If you are in the manufacturing space, the investments in equipment must be more than Rs 5 Cr, and less than Rs 10 Cr. Whereas if you are in the services sector, the range is between Rs 2 Cr to Rs 5 Cr. The central government’s department, ministries and their PSU’s; under the public procurement policy, have to procure at least 20% of their purchases from the small & medium enterprises.
  • These relaxations and exemptions by the Indian government; for the budding SMEs are indeed a very positive boost and extending a helping hand to the SMEs in letting them grow their business.

Interestingly, SMEs are hesitant even in Europe and America. However every bid received by an SME stands 26% chance of winning the contract.

To put it in another way, SMEs win just 1 out of every 4 proposals that they submit. But even for that, someone has to submit a proposal bid for the tender. 

2. Get an online login & apply for government tenders

Go online, enroll & get your login ID!

  • As a bidder, first start with your online enrollment. To apply for government tenders, you may go online to the state government websites or specific websites like eprocure .Let’s take the example of e-procure here.
  • Once you are on the homepage of the e-procurement portal https://eprocure.gov.in/eprocure/app , just look for Online Bidder Enrollment tab which is below the login button on right side of the page.
  • Once you have enrolled, then you will need the e-token to do the digital signature.
  • To get the e-token, you need to reach out to one the certified authorizing authorities like eMudhraCA or GNFC or IDRBT or MTNL Trustline or SafeScrpt or TCS.
  • After you get the e-token, then login to the portal and do the digital signature with the e-token that you received.
  • During enrollment, you will have to provide a user id and password, and that will be used henceforth for logging on to the portal.
  • The e-token that is registered for you as a bidder, must be used only by you, and shouldn’t be misused by others.
  • Digital signature certificate or DSC once mapped to an account, can’t be mapped to another account; It will only get inactivated. So be clear and careful when you are about to do the digital signature for yourself as a bidder.

Using the e-procurement portal for online bidding

As a preparatory task, go to “MY DOCUMENTS” tab and upload the documents pertaining to you company for things like certificates, purchase orders etc on to that. This is like the tender library that you have already started working on.

So you need to now just copy all those documents from your tender library, and upload them in “MY DOCUMENTS”.

This will further help you just select these already uploaded documents to be attached with the bid documents during the bid submission.

Important checklist to avoid rejection:

  1. Always have your documents in one of the following formats only – PDF/XLS/RAR/DWF
  2. Ensure that you have collected all the important documents that need to be attached with the bid proposal. Missing out on even one document that has been asked in the tender document, will draw you towards rejection.
  3. For clear and legible scanned documents, always follow – 75-100 DPI during the scanning process of documents.
  4. Ensure that you click on “Freeze Bid” Button to have the bid submission process completed. If you have not completed this step, your bid shall be considered incomplete/invalid.
  5. Once you have downloaded the tender document, Follow the BOQ template as is, don’t try to modify/edit it, else you may face rejection. Just enter the relevant values and bidder name.
  6. In case you are making offline payment of EMD, ensure that you have the scan copy of same submitted during the bid submission, otherwise your bid will get rejected.
  7. Always submit your bid well before the submission end date and time (as per the server system clock), any delay in submission will not be addressed later on.

3. Mark the tender award date & track it for the result

Post the bid submission, the procurement authority evaluates the bids by scoring them against each criterion.

In case of a simple assessment methodology, the score of each criterion is multiplied with its weightage and then final average is arrived at, by adding them all.

In more complex methodologies of assessment, there are other criteria apart from scoring which are taken into account. Hence each clients’ priorities and needs makes them define their evaluation criteria differently.

On the tender award date, the bidder to whom the tender is awarded is disclosed to all the participating authorities by notifying them about it.

That’s the day, you know if you have won the tender or not. Even if the result is negative, and you haven’t won the tender; you must look at it as a future opportunity to become better in your proposal pitch.

Details of awarded Contract & other information

However, most of the government websites and the tender aggregation websites publish the contract awarded results too.

It not only mentions the contract awardee, but also the L2 & L3 parties. In addition it also mentions the BOQ submitted by all 3 parties.

That becomes an important input for you to analyze what may have gone wrong, even if you aren’t in the top 3 contenders.

Typically, SMEs do not end up analyzing the contract awarded information, but in my view they must look at it and analyze it; if they want to win few large enough contracts in future.

Post identifying the bidder with best score, the negotiations begin. They may be done by multiple other sets of people at different levels. When both the parties reach the agreement stage, the final draft is what becomes the contract document for final closure.

Always ask for feedback on why you got rejected

In case you have the luxury of reaching out to the authority personnel, then you must ask some important questions that will help you in future applications as well. Something on below lines may be helpful:

  • What was the breakdown of your score in the entire bid proposal document?
  • What were the key highlights that made the other party win the tender?
  • In which all verticals could you not match the requirements of the buyer?
  • Did you miss to attach any of the supporting documents while submitting the bid?

Hope this article was helpful, and gave you more insight into the processes and details of applying for a government tender. If you would like to know more about how to bid for tenders, or help in choosing the types of tenders you should bid for, please feel free to reach out to BidAssist team @ contact@bidassist.com or call on 1800 102 9586.