eTendering and eProcurement are fast becoming the front line of public sector tendering practice.  Purchasers are moving more and more towards online solutions for releasing tenders and seeking submissions from contractors so it's important that, if you are a contractor, you get to grips with eTendering and eProcurement in order to better your chances when tendering. 

Why are we moving more towards an online culture when tendering? There are a number of reasons for this, which make a great deal of sense no matter which side of the tendering process you are sitting on. 

Firstly, like most web-based endeavours, there is the convenience and speed aspect. As a contractor you no longer have to spend your life searching through vast piles of newspapers or tackling the printed version of the Official Journal of the European Union, which is quite a hefty volume to say the least. Tenders online mean that you are never more than a few clicks away from an easily accessible stockpile of all of the latest tenders, and that stockpile will be easy to filter through using keywords, CPV codes or industry and country specific filters. If you can spend less time trawling through the tender pile in the first place, and more time analysing only the most relevant ones to see which you should apply for, your business can only grow in strength where tendering is concerned. 

Another reason that eTendering and eProcurement is proving a firm favourite is the fast method of back and forth communication that it offers. You can register your interest in a tender online and be sent the Pre-Qualification Questionnaire electronically in a fraction of the time that it would take for those things to be mailed or even faxed back and forth. The time spent administrating the whole process is drastically cut, leaving the contractor and the vast majority of local authorities that use eTendering and eProcurement, more time to get on with running their businesses and moving ahead with projects. 

Tendering online is also thought to present a fairer and more transparent system all round. You can start with the fact that the information is readily available to anyone who takes an interest and they should be able to access the information at the touch of a button, opening up the stakes to a lot of companies who may have struggled with the time to tender previously. Perhaps more importantly, eTendering leaves a digital audit trail from the publication of a tender, right through to the contract award. It is much more difficult to hide unjust behaviour when the process is out there for all to see. 

While eTendering and eProcurement is nothing new, it is becoming more and more standard in the practice of tendering. As with all things on the internet, there is also a great amount of space for development. The future of tendering is likely to be online so it might just pay off to get to grips with using the internet to your advantage now.