Our digital tools, solutions and services
We care about better public procurement that delivers concrete results. That’s why we work with governments and nonprofits around the world to build effective and human-centred digital solutions for procurement. We want to help you have information that is accurate, timely, and actionable, including implementing the global best practice data standard, the Open Contracting Data Standard.
Our digital solutions help governments leverage data for better decision-making to achieve goals such as better planning and spending taxpayer dollars, increasing contracting with local small businesses, increasing transparency and accountability, and enabling community participation.
Learn more about some of the tools, solutions and services we offer, covering the full process from user research, mapping and engaging with stakeholders to service design and software development.
Improving procurement implementation
Current procurement tech serves bureaucracy, not people. We will work with you to build better e-procurement and other digital solutions to meet people’s needs and make procurement simpler, clearer, and faster for everyone.
Pre-bidding module
The preliminary bidding module, Prebases, publishes the complete text of relevant documents such as the draft specifications, award process details, and technical annexes on an electronic procurement system. Registered suppliers, civil society organizations, and citizens can ask questions, make recommendations, and add comments. Their comments are all published on the site, along with any responses from the procuring entity.
This module is an efficient and cost-effective way to consult the market, allows for early flagging of potential issues, and streamlines government workload. By consolidating feedback in a single organized platform, instead of dealing with a flood of unstructured feedback from various sources, officials can prioritize key issues and ensure the right team members respond. This module is currently in use by the government of Mexico City, Mexico.
Monitoring risk and performance
Information that is accurate, timely, and actionable should be at the core of every procurement decision. The Open Contracting Data Standard we administer is a global best practice data standard to structure your data and build solutions such as business intelligence tools or dashboards to monitor red flags. Our open-source library Cardinal help to calculate public procurement red flags.
Real-time red flags dashboard, Dominican Republic
Identifying corruption risks in real time is critical to better, more efficient and accountable public procurement processes. Building on our red flag methodology, we created a data-driven corruption risk monitoring system as an “Early Warning System.” The dashboard integrates 21 indicators for the most common red flags, for example, on ties between suppliers and politicians, large contracts that have been broken up into smaller ones to undercut thresholds, and links to prohibited practices. With support from Microsoft, we implemented the dashboard in the Dominican Republic. It now covers 300 daily procurements by more than 500 buyers engaging 111,000 suppliers.
Additional examples of business intelligence tools include a dashboard for tracking uptake of sustainability criteria in Lithuania and dashboards for analyzing unit price to support efficient use of funds in several countries in Europe and Central Asia.
Connecting small businesses to opportunity
Small businesses often face challenges that reduce their opportunities to participating in public procurement, including a lack of information and transparency, overly complex procedures and access to finance.
Vigía, Paraguay
The procurement opportunity platform, Vigia, allows entrepreneurs to easily find public procurement business opportunities by as well as provide real-time, high-quality feedback about irregularities. One of Vigia’s special features is an SME-oriented search engine, which was created based on what suppliers wanted to know: goods and services, tender amount and the essential dates. Vigia is also able to match a supplier with specific opportunities based on the supplier’s characteristics. This platform is currently used by the government of Paraguay.
MiTiendita Virtual
Another example of a solution for connecting small businesses to opportunity is the small business one-stop platform MiTiendita Virtual, which enables small businesses in Mexico City to proactively share their business information with government buyers, an annual purchasing calendar, and a search engine to help find relevant opportunities.
CREDERE
The connection to capital tool, Credere, is an innovative open-source solution designed to help small businesses access credit to comply with public contracts and be more competitive. This platform enables financial institutions to leverage open procurement data to invite small businesses that have recently secured government contracts to apply for financial products. By pre-populating credit applications with data from awarded contracts, Credere simplifies and accelerates the credit approval process for small businesses. This solution was piloted in Bogotá, Colombia, and has been scaled up nationally. We are currently developing a pilot for a similar tool at the local level in the United States by partnering with Community Development Financial Institutions.
Planning resilient infrastructure
Disaster Risk Reduction data solution
The Disaster Risk Reduction tool is a sophisticated data model that joins up complex datasets spanning flood hazard, exposure, vulnerability and government contracts, to make it easier for decision-makers to identify and prioritize the right investments that better serve the most vulnerable communities at risk of floods. This model is currently in use by the State of Assam government in India, and is now being scaled up across other states.
DREAM reconstruction ecosystem
Additional examples of solutions for resilient infrastructure include the umbrella system for infrastructure reconstruction in Ukraine that integrates real-time damage assessments, budgets, project planning, procurement and delivery, which creates a single pipeline from communities to funders and helps to coordinate all stages of reconstruction project implementation.