Finding your way around public procurement platforms
Date
October, 2025
Reading time
8 minutes
Category
Best practice
Peggy Herman
is co-founder and Managing Director of Bee4win, where she oversees the company’s consulting and pre-sales service activities. Since 2002, she has managed numerous public and private tenders, ranging from a few tens of thousands to several hundred million euros, in sectors as varied as IT, energy, industry and events. An expert in pre-sales, Peggy continues to provide bid management and writing services, coaching and training. She has also been conducting studies on best practices in this field for over 10 years. Committed to the development of the pre-sales profession, she is president of the French-speaking chapter of APMP and a frequent speaker at events including the Bid and Proposal Conference Europe and Bee4win’s customers.
Experte en avant-vente, Peggy réalise encore aujourd’hui des prestations en bid management, bid writing, coaching et formation, et mène depuis 10 ans des travaux d’étude sur les meilleures pratiques du domaine. Engagée dans la promotion de l’avant-vente, elle préside le chapter Francophonie de l’APMP et intervient régulièrement en tant que conférencière, notamment lors de la Bid and Proposal Conference Europe et auprès des clients de Bee4win.
Mots clés
#Go/No-go
#Appeld’offre
#Qualificationd’opportunité
The landscape of public procurement platforms can seem complex for companies wishing to respond effectively to calls for tenders. Between trading rooms, official advertising portals, forecasting tools such as APPROCH, and private aggregators, it is not always easy to know where to look for information, where to submit a bid, and how to organize your monitoring. This article reviews the key differences between these systems and explains how to integrate them into a comprehensive strategy for responding to calls for tenders.
1. Trading rooms: the electronic marketplace for public buyers
Trading rooms, also known as dematerialization platforms, are digital spaces where public buyers publish their consultations and where companies submit their applications and bids. In practical terms, they enable users to download consultation documents (DCE), ask questions via an integrated messaging system, submit applications and bids online, and even sign documents electronically.
Among the best known are:
- PLACE for government and ministry contracts,
- MAXIMILIEN for the Île-de-France region and its member organizations,
- MEGALIS for public contracts in Brittany,
- as well as numerous local platforms such as Marchés Sécurisés, AWS-Achat, and Alsace Marchés Publics.
In short, trading rooms are the official points of contact for submitting and tracking bids: this is where companies collect the tender documents and submit their responses.
2. Official portals: mandatory legal advertising
Regulations require that calls for tenders above certain thresholds be published in official media that guarantee transparency and equal access. Advertising rules vary depending on the contract amount and the nature of the buyer. These official portals are not used to submit bids, but to ensure legal advertising that is accessible to all.
The two main references are:
- the BOAMP (Official Bulletin of Public Procurement Notices), mandatory for certain thresholds in France,
- the JOUE/TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), the official journal of the European Union, used for contracts exceeding European thresholds.
These are genuine “official journals” for public procurement.
3. Anticipation portals: preparing for future markets
New tools now provide access to information prior to official publications. The best known is APPROCH, the national platform that centralizes the purchasing intentions of public buyers.
Its advantage is that it provides visibility upstream: companies can thus anticipate their resources, identify potential partners, and prepare their strategy before a call for tenders is officially posted online. APPROCH is therefore becoming a valuable tool for increasing responsiveness and avoiding the sometimes short deadlines of procedures.
4. Aggregator portals: a centralized view of opportunities
Faced with the dispersion of sources (local trading rooms, BOAMP, OJEU, etc.), private actors offer aggregator portals. These collect and consolidate data from different sources and present it in a single space, with search and monitoring tools.
Among the most widely used are Qualify, France Marchés, DoubleTrade, and VecteurPlus. These solutions often offer additional services such as personalized alerts, dashboards, and sector analyses. Qualify, for example, offers features for anticipating renewals, analyzing the competition, retrieving previous tender documents, and intelligently analyzing the content of tender documents to prepare a Go-Nogo decision. These features save a lot of time and eliminate the need for multiple manual searches.
5. Winning strategy: combining tools
To be effective, a company must combine these different tools. Here is a summary infographic comparing the different types of platforms and their usefulness.
Conclusion
Responding effectively to public tenders is not just a matter of monitoring official publications, but also knowing how to use all the available tools in a complementary manner. Trading rooms are the submission points, official portals guarantee legal publicity, APPROCH helps with anticipation, and aggregators facilitate research, monitoring, and qualification. By combining these sources, companies save time, structure their commercial strategy for anticipation and targeting, avoid missing out on a market in their target, and significantly increase their chances of success.
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