Hermix processes ~3,000 procurement notices daily, from across Europe and international institutions. To receive relevant alerts and avoid missing opportunities, it’s crucial to set up effective and powerful filters.

Ideally, the filters should give a reasonable number of new opportunities every day. Thus, they should be:

• Sufficiently generic – to catch all relevant opportunities.
• Sufficiently specific – in order to ignore most irelevant tenders.

The ideal number of daily tenders that can be analyzed by a small-medium team would be roughly 5-10 opportunities.

Over 100 opportunities per day means the market is too high and must be segmented. 100 tenders would require a huge effort to qualify, so most will probably be ignored.

Less than 2-3 tenders could mean that the target market is too small.

The most relevant filters are:

• Industry, Domain
• Keywords
• Buyer country
• Buyer type,
• Data source

Best practices:

• Choose the Industry, then drill-down to Domains (i.e. CPV division).
• Avoid using Topics (CPV codes). They are too specific, thus difficult to manage.
• Search either by Keyword, or by Industry/Domain – not both.
  • Using both simultaneously could restrict the search excessively.
  • Of course, unless you look for a very specific, very rare type of project.
• Search either by Buyer country or Buyer type: European/international institutions.
  • E.g., European and international institutions have offices in multiple countries, so the country is less relevant for them.
• Avoid very wide filters
  • E.g.,”IT for the entire Europe”, or ”all tenders in 20 countries”. Hermix analyzes cca. 3000 tenders daily. A very wide filter return very many (irrelevant) results.
• Avoid filtering by a specific Buyer (or Contractor)
  • It is always possible that a tender might be published under a wrong / different Buyer Name, and with wrong contact details. In this case, the tender would not be classified under the correct Buyer.
  • E.g. a Buyer such as ”EC – DG DIGIT – Directorate-General for Informatics” might publish a tender under a wrong Buyer, e.g. ”DIGIT”, or ”EC”.
  • A good practice is to extend the search, e.g. to search by Buyer type rather than Buyer name.
  • Another option is to search by keywords included in the Buyer name, such as ”Starts with…” or ”Containts…”

Examples:

• Open tenders, software services, for EU/international institutions
• Open tenders, IT keywords, for EU/intl institutions
• Open tenders, software services, Netherlands
• Open tenders, software services, mentioning cyber-security keywords, Norway

For additional information, please refer also to Frequently asked questions: use keyword search.