Procurement & finance
E-Tendering
Running the tender process through an online portal — issue, clarification, submission and evaluation. The benefit is auditability: an unalterable record of who received what, and when each bid arrived.
The commercial benefit that gets overlooked is the queries log. Every question, every answer, visible to all bidders, timestamped. It is the strongest evidence of a fair process you can produce, and it is a by-product of running one.
The adoption cost falls on small subcontractors, and it is real: portals with fifty registration fields and no Excel round-trip will simply lose you bidders. And a bidder lost is a price you did not receive.