Croatia, Slovakia and Slovenia establish TendersForAll, an automated translated eProcurement tool, with CEF eTranslation

TendersForAll

Three consortium partners- Croatia, Slovakia and Slovenia- set up a cross-border translation service to open the tendering process to more suppliers.  All of them are key eProcurement stakeholders and are operating national eProcurement platforms in their country, under the umbrella of the Ministries of Economy for Slovenia and Croatia and the Ministry of Interior in Slovakia.

Although public procurement opens a vast field of business opportunities for companies across Europe, it is often difficult for most businesses to find the information on relevant public sector tenders. With eProcurement, the digitalised public procurement process, the management of public tenders was set to be simplified to shorten the bidding cycle, increase transparency and boost the innovation.

The Solution

TenderForAll provides a solution for businesses to find relevant tendering information. It is a platform that grants access to cross-border information on recently open public procurement tenders in each nation's respective language. The platform uses CEF's eTranslation building block to maximise the value of the information for the end users, with the aim of attracting more cross-border participation in public procurement markets.

The platform interconnects procurement systems from Croatia, Slovakia and Slovenia. On a daily basis, each system in each of the three Member States generates information on new tenders (called Tender Information) and sends them to TendersForAll. Tender Information (TI), consisting of a combination of textual and numerical data, is then sent to the eTranslation server and automatically translated as a text snippet. Pre-defined rules set the source, and target languages of newly-received TI and eTranslation returns the translated output to the platform every few minutes.

Translated Tender Information is stored in the platforms database, and individual eProcurement systems connected to the platform can request translated information for redistribution to their users. Communication through web services and UBL data format exchange simplify the interconnection of eProcurement platforms to TenderForAll.

What are the benefits of the platform? 

Before TendersForAll was launched, no translation of tender notices in Croatian, Slovak and Slovenian were provided, and the three countries did not share tenders electronically. By using our eTranslation building block and services, the new system enabled users to ask for 35 649 translations, in total 1092 word pages, by 1 July 2018.

The main benefit of TendersForAll rests in providing effective access to the tendering information for potential suppliers in their language. Attracting them to tendering procedures enhances the competition and potentially the cost-effectiveness of the purchases of public administrations in the participating countries. Overall, public tendering has been simplified, resulting in shorter bidding cycles, increased transparency and boosting innovation. Thereby, TendersForAll is bringing the Digital Single Market one step closer to all citizens and businesses.

What's next?

The TendersForAll project was launched on June 1, 2017, and ended on June 28, 2018. In the past year, the overall workflow has been adequately integrated: the eTranslation server can now handle large volumes of data, process the automated translation of Tender Information and return the translated data to TendersForAll. The continuous support of the CEF eTranslation team has also allowed the consortium to address some issues.

Shortly, there are plans to collect feedback, evaluate impact data and provide statistics, as consortium partners are interested in long-term operation including the interconnection with eProcurement platforms in other Member states.

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