Summary

How do you help businesses find the right tender, amongst millions, in under a second?

Thornton and Lowe has helped companies manage bids and write tenders across the public and commercial sectors for the last 10 years. A full-service bid consultancy, Thornton and Lowe also offers bid writing, bid training and creative bid services. 

Their objective

They asked Hamari to help develop a state of the art search engine for live tenders and past contractor award notices that would not only add significant value to the industry, but also help drive new business enquiries for the firm. They also hoped that the new engine would help its consultants to advise clients as to the best tenders to bid for, saving valuable time and optimising the bid-writing process.

Our approach

Thornton and Lowe came to us with a number of user stories highlighting the company’s requirements. We started by mapping out the customer journey. By understanding the data requirements, we came up with a cohesive plan that allowed us to organise the data in a way that intuitively guided users to find the most relevant tender or awarded contract notice.

Our goal was to build a cohesive data-set by scraping from individual portals such as Open Contracting and TED.eu. Once we were able to do this, our next job was to create a search API layer capable of finding the relevant data.

The result

The answer was Tender Pipeline, a digital solution that used customised web-scraping and automation to collect the relevant data, built using Lumen, a lightweight PHP framework based on Laravel, and managed using Craft CMS.

It allows users to search for tenders by buyer, winner, CPV code, date and contract value, as well as offering a feature that allows users to receive tender alerts about current contracts.

Launched in January 2019 to Thornton and Lowe’s internal database, Tender Pipeline now has a user-base of more than 500 clients and is rapidly growing, having already proven a valuable asset to the consultancy.

What they said

“Fareed was very easy to work with. He was able to recommend creative solutions to our requirements and was both flexible and highly professional. The product delivered by his team met every single one of our objectives - we couldn’t be happier.”

Interested in what we can do for your business? Get in touch.