Tendersdirect

[scooby]

Anyone use this? Appears a little expensive at £895 + VAT for a years subscription...

[northernladuk]

Doesn't get much praise from these guys, well except for the MD of Millstream Associates who storms in with his pitch.....

All the other posts seem to explain how to do it for free....

http://www.4networking.biz/Forum/ViewTopic/48734

[tractor]

....

Anyone use this? Appears a little expensive at £895 + VAT for a years subscription...

Do the work yourself for public sector contracts, register free and set up your own searches using TED Europa.

There are lots of aggregators who simply linkback to TED and charge you for the privilege.

Beware though that unless your business sector or skillset is very niche, most public sector procurement bods are of the 'No-one ever got fired for buying IBM' mindset which means often you are in for a lot of selling, marketing, quotation building and associated costs when there never really was any chance of you getting the work.

[centurian]

Beware though that unless your business sector or skillset is very niche, most public sector procurement bods are of the 'No-one ever got fired for buying IBM' mindset which means often you are in for a lot of selling, marketing, quotation building and associated costs when there never really was any chance of you getting the work.

WHS

Plus most are decided in advance anyway - not due to backhanders - just more a case of they know the supplier they want from the outset, but happily jump through all the hoops wasting everyone's time - all to come to the decision they wanted to make in the first place.

[Tenders Direct]

Tenders Direct

Hi,

I'm Tim Williams the MD of Tenders Direct (Tenders Direct - The smart way to win contracts) and I hope you don't mind if I add my comments to this thread (or perhaps 'storm in' as Northernlad called my comments on 4networking).

As far as the cost of our service is concerned I think it depends on the benefit you gain and whether there are any alternatives:

Benefits - Provided you have made the investment necessary to submit competitive tenders, there is a lot of work to be won from the public sector. There are lots of complaints about the bureaucracy, inefficiency, etc., which are usually justifiable, but if you prepare well and persevere there are substantial rewards as well. That might be regular contracts for £10,000, or larger ones for £100k or much more. For example, we're only a small company but we have just won a contract worth £4.8 million from the Norwegian Government. I can give you lots more examples of companies of all sizes that win contracts both large and small. So if a subscription of £895 provides you with the information that results in a contract win of £100,000, is that expensive, or good value?

Alternatives - Several of the posts on here and also on the 4networking post referred to above, point out that you can search for and find this information yourself. Of course you can do it yourself, a large amount of the information available in Tenders Direct is in the public domain, but how much time will it take to find and how much will it cost you to do that? Apart from the 6,000 public sector organisations in the UK and Ireland that directly use our services to publish their contracts, we compile information from more than 600 other sources (websites, newspapers, trade journals, etc.) and we do this every day. If you employ a member of staff on £20,000/year they probably cost you at least £15/hour. So if they spend just 1 hour/week looking for tenders, that has cost you £780, 2 hours a week £1,560. So is £895 still expensive?

There are other tender information services available, some cheaper than us, some more expensive. I happen to think we're the best, and good value for the price, but that's up to you to judge. Our objective is to ensure that if a public sector tender that you might be interested in is published anywhere in the UK then we will email you the information so that you can submit a bid.

Finally a word of warning if you take out a free trial for tender information, at least 2 of our competitors operate free trials that if not cancelled within the trial period automatically convert into annual subscriptions that are difficult to escape without a big financial penalty. So if you don't want to continue after the trial period, make sure you cancel and keep a record of your cancellation.

Regards

Tim

[yasockie]

WHS

Plus most are decided in advance anyway - not due to backhanders - just more a case of they know the supplier they want from the outset, but happily jump through all the hoops wasting everyone's time - all to come to the decision they wanted to make in the first place.

This - I was the unfortunate bod who had to write all the specs etc for a call for tenders, where we've already had a supplier who was unofficially working on a product/service already - we've received a couple of other bids, but unsurprisingly the existing supplier won, all my work was in vain (which I knew in advance) and I got out of there as soon as I had a better offer (in private sector mind - where at least there is money justification for some of the things that people are doing)

[tractor]

...

This - I was the unfortunate bod who had to write all the specs etc for a call for tenders, where we've already had a supplier who was unofficially working on a product/service already - we've received a couple of other bids, but unsurprisingly the existing supplier won, all my work was in vain (which I knew in advance) and I got out of there as soon as I had a better offer (in private sector mind - where at least there is money justification for some of the things that people are doing)

^^ this is the saddest thing about it. The competition regulations absolutely forbid this kind of fraud but unless you have deep enough pockets, there is nothing that you can do about it. We all know how much notice the Business Secretary takes when he is told something.

The penalty for breaking the rules is up to 10% of turnover for public organisations. Nothing ever happens though

Competition in public procurement is about as fair as it is in the construction industry!

[CodeCobbler]

The above seems to echo what I have discovered.
Tenders are usually already decided so you need to get into the inside with contacts. How you do that, well that can be difficult.

If you are an unknown its all appears as pretty much a big stitch up!

I would not pay for TD unless you are already established. Besides you can find all that info free which I have done.