Hermix processes ~2,000 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.

For a small team, 5-10 opportunities per day can be analyzed efficiently. But 100 opportunities per day would require a huge effort to qualify.

The most relevant filters are:

• Industry, Domain
• Keywords
• Authority country
• Authority type.

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.
• Use either keyword search, or Industry/Domain – not both.

-Using both simultaneously will restrict the search excessively.

-Of course, unless you look for a very specific, very rare type of project).

• Either choose the Authority country, or Authority type: European/international institutions.

-International institutions have offices in multiple countries, so the country is less relevant for them.

-When searching for tenders in a specific country, the authority type has very little relevance.

• Do not setup a very generic filter, e.g. ”IT for the entire Europe”, or ”all tenders in 10 countries”. Hermix analyzes cca. 2000 tenders daily, so a very generic filter returns too many (irrelevant) results.
• Avoid filtering by a specific Authority (Contractor).

-E.g. an Authority such as ”EC – DG DIGIT – Directorate-General for Informatics” might publish another tender under a different name and with different codes, e.g. ”EC DIGIT”, or ”DIGIT”, or ”EC”. Accordingly, in some cases Hermix cannot identify the precise authority.

-A good practice is to extend the search, e.g. to search by Authority type rather than Authority name.

-Another option is to search by keywords included in the Authority 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.