Where to find available tenders
By Werner van Rooyen, Director of HowToTender (Pty) Ltd which specializes in tender consulting and tender training.
Business owners often ask us where they can find tenders that are currently available. Although we are not in the business of finding available tenders, our Tender Manual does have a chapter that deals with finding available tenders.
Due to the high demand for this I have decided to advise you on five different ways to find available tenders.
- News Papers
Most of the available tenders, if not all of them, are advertised in newspapers. It depends on the type of tender, but most tenders are at least advertised in a local newspaper. If it is a large tender it will most probably be advertised in more than one newspaper and it will also be advertised in a newspaper that is distributed nationally. The problem with local newspapers is that you will only be able to find available tenders in your area. Should you receive national newspapers in your area you can find countrywide tenders from those newspapers. This is not a very effective way to find tenders because you can easily overlook an advertisement. It is also very time consuming and it is not tender specific. - Internet
You can try searching the internet to find available tenders. You will find a whole bundle of available tenders. There are a couple of problems with finding available tenders on the internet:
- The tenders can be outdated. The internet does not differentiate between current tenders and expired tenders.
- It is very timeconsuming searching through the millions of search results. If you search the phrase “tenders available in South Africa” on Google, you will get around 3 450 000 results. Nobody has time to go through that many results.
- Tender Bulletin
The National Treasury publicise a weekly tender bulletin that carries all the available tenders for that week. The tender bulletin is free of charge if you download the bulletin from the Department National Treasury’s website (www.treasury.gov.za). You can download the Tender Bulletin and see which tenders are available for that week. There are a few drawbacks when using the tender bulletin:
- The tender bulletin is publicised every week. So, you must check it every week.
- The tender bulletin is usually an exceptionally large document. The current tender bulletin is 248 pages long.
- If you access the internet via your cell phone you are going to struggle to download this large document. You are also going to struggle to read it on your cell phone.
- The tender bulletin is not tender specific. You will have to go through every tender to find the specific tender that you want to respond to.
- If you do not have access to the internet you can subscribe to the tender bulletin. But this is expensive.
- The tender bulletin only carries tenders from Organs of State. There are no Private Sector Tenders advertised in the tender bulletin.
- Large Companies
Normally you will find that large State-Owned Companies and large Corporates publicise their own tender bulletins. You will also find that these companies publicise their tenders on their websites. To have access to these tenders that become available you will have to monitor these companies’ websites and tender bulletins on a constant basis to find the tenders that you are interested in. This is very time consuming and the chance of missing that once in a lifetime tender might just pass you the day you decide not to check the websites or tender bulletins. - Tender Websites
Tender websites are websites (businesses) that specializes in gathering all the available tenders daily whether it is Public or Private Sector tenders. You will instantly find a lot of these websites if you search for tenders on the internet. The trick is to find the one best suited for your specific needs. Some of these tender website companies specialize in specific available tenders and others publicise all available tenders.
What make these tender websites the best option to consider when you want to find available tenders is that these tender websites usually offer tender specific services. This means that you can choose an industry and only tenders in that specific industry will be sent to you. This means there are several advantages of using a tender website:
- It is not time consuming at all.
- It is industry specific. On most of these websites you can choose more than one industry.
- Most of these tender websites email the available tenders to you daily.
- You have peace of mind that you will not miss that life changing tender.
The only downside of these tender websites is that it is not for free. I suggest that if you want to take your business to the next tender level you subscribe to one of these websites.
To learn more about this and many other tender conditions attend our “Become a Tender Expert” 2-Day workshops presented in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Cape Town. Book and pay online at https://howtotender.co.za/tender-expert-form/
Contact us at wernervr@howtotender.co.za should you need more information.
You can also purchase a Tender Manual (Handbook) on our website https://howtotender.co.za/ which is a step by step guide how to respond to a South African Tender. It includes examples of completed SBD forms.
