Companies stuffed into a bottle. The paradox of Polish tenders

Polish companies have been hearing for years that participation in public procurement should be simpler and more accessible. In theory, everything looks perfect – information about tenders is public, published in accordance with the regulations and available to everyone.

In practice, an entrepreneur who wants to find the right course of action often finds himself in a maze of websites, platforms and documents. And in order not to search them manually, he often has to pay.

Open information, but behind a paywall

According to data from the Public Procurement Office, the value of the public procurement market in Poland exceeded PLN 600 billion in 2024. This is a huge market to which theoretically every entrepreneur has equal access. The problem is that finding interesting proceedings can be time-consuming and expensive.

– The law is clear: information about tender procedures is public. In practice, however, we encounter a market absurdity – access to this data has become a premium product, hidden behind login systems and paywalls. Many entrepreneurs have to pay commercial intermediaries just to search for advertisements and verify documentation, notes Jędrzej Anuszkiewicz-Michałek, strategist and co-founder of OpenNexus.

Where did this model come from? According to experts, the problem does not result from the lack of transparency of regulations, but from the dispersion of information.

– Announcements are published in many places at once – on the European website TED, on the government e-Procurement portal, on the purchasing platforms of individual institutions. Formally, everything is public. Practically no one has time to browse a dozen websites every day, so they pay someone to do it for them. Transparency without accessibility turned out to be a commodity – adds the expert.

As he emphasizes, the biggest problem is that the costs of access to information hit small companies the hardest.

– It shouldn’t be like this. You cannot charge fees for access to information that, by law, belongs to every citizen and every entrepreneur willing to participate in a tender. Information on the distribution of public funds should be available on equal terms – regardless of the scale of the company’s operations – notes the co-founder of OpenNexus.

Not just money. Companies also pay with their time

Finding a tender is just the beginning. The second problem remains the analysis of documentation. The Specification of the Order Terms often consists of several dozen pages, and reading it carefully and identifying the most important provisions takes up to 45 minutes.

– The scale makes an impression only after multiplication. A company that seriously monitors the market and reviews ten proceedings a week spends over seven hours just reading specifications – a full day of a specialist’s work, every week. As a result, the decision “should we start or give up” is made later than it should be. Or it doesn’t sink at all, says Jędrzej Anuszkiewicz-Michałek.

AI to the rescue

The answer to this problem is to be artificial intelligence, which can quickly extract the most important information from documentation.

– Algorithms can analyze complex tender documentation in 90 seconds and extract the most important data from it: the subject of the procedure, conditions of participation, documentation requirements and key information about the deposit. The time needed to decide to participate in the proceedings is reduced from three quarters of an hour to one and a half minutes – thirty times – explains Anuszkiewicz-Michałek.

Access to tenders without additional barriers

According to experts, the future of the public procurement market will depend not only on changes in the law, but also on facilitating entrepreneurs’ access to information and automating the most time-consuming tasks. For this reason, OpenNexus decided to provide a tender search engine and an SWZ analysis tool free of charge.

– We declare clearly: access to tender knowledge and SWZ analysis will remain free. We do not charge any commission on winning proceedings. Our business model is based on additional services and work automation tools – not on information barriers – emphasizes Anuszkiewicz-Michałek.