Anyone who has spent time trawling through government tender and procurement data will know exactly how difficult it can be to extract genuine insights and broad market intelligence from the raw data.
It is time-consuming and costly to track government purchasing, whether across product segments or across departments, or even across the different levels of government. But for companies that are able to spent time, there is enormously valuable information held within raw procurement data.
That’s been an issue for suppliers to government forever. A Sydney-based AI-based startup called Tendertrace has now built a subscription platform that brings all of this data into a single place, and has refined it in a way that makes it easily queried for easily consumed market intelligence.
In this episode of The Commercial Disco, I spoke to the Tendertrace founder and chief executive officer Abu Odigie about the value that can be extracted from government purchasing data and why it has been such a thorny problem to solve.
Mr Odigie has worked on both sides of the sale – for both the public sector and for government suppliers – and has worked in the area across multiple countries.
In Australia, procurement data is quite decentralised and fragmented. The federal government has its AusTender website, the NSW Government has its eTendering site among others, and each state collects and presents its data in different ways.
Tendertrace brings all of that data into a single platform and applies a bunch of software smarts to enable that data to be accessed and queried in variety of ways.
“So how do we bring all of this information into a single pane of glass to start with [is the question we started with],” Mr Odigie said.
“And then how do we use technology and smarts in order to provide insights and analysis, and competitive data and market trends, to then inform suppliers so that they can better engage with the government.
“[This enables them to] build the right go-to-market strategy, they can engage with the right partners, and really they can reduce their cost of engagement to the government, as well and minimise opportunity costs.
“That’s ultimately what Tendertrace is all about.”
InnovationAus.com is proud to announce it has entered a commercial reseller partnership with Tendertrace. If you would like a full demonstration of the power of the platform please contact the InnovationAus.com publisher Corrie McLeod at corrie@innovationaus.com.
There have been other aggregation services that brings data together in some form or another, Mr Odijie says.
But there has not been a platform model that applied the level of software intelligence – based on the depth of experience of the Tendertrace team as a supplier to government – that is build into the Tendertrace product.
“What we are doing differently is based a couple of things. The first thing is that we understand what suppliers to government need, because we have been in that space for a very long time,” Mr Odigie said.
“We have engaged the government, we have engaged procurement teams, we have been part of buying cycles before.
“So we understand the data that’s relevant to suppliers, and what they would need to see when they engage it – before the buying cycle begins and during the buying cycle – and what those competitive landscapes looks like.”
Mr Odigie says the procurement data speaks for itself, and provides different kinds of value to different market segments.
But it is certainly true that Tendertrace makes the data more accessible to more potential users.
Current customers include some of the worlds largest companies, largest professional services firms, as well as small to medium-sized businesses.
But Mr Odigie said it should also provide value to government departments and agencies, providing a graphical presentation that makes it simple and easy to identify trends within an organisations’ own procurement practices.
“We live in a data centric world, and it’s very important that we leverage data and data is used to inform our lives nowadays,” he said. “So why don’t we leverage that [data] to drive our behaviour as we engage with government?
To arrange a demonstration of the Tendertrace platform, please contact InnovationAus publisher Corrie McLeod at corrie@innovationaus.com.
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