The Tenders Electronic Daily or TED is one of the many sources we follow and draw from to feed the FoxATM Market Radar. This extension of the European Union's Official Journal contains calls for tenders and contract awards notices for all works in the EU area above certain value thresholds. Searching through thousands of TED notices for all possible industries in 27+ countries every day is a tedious work - pun intended 😉. On a typical day, more than 2000 notices are published. The data are complex and not always well encoded. This is why we developed our own tool, which uses multiple sets of criteria to identify notices relevant to the air traffic management and airport industries and feed them into our market intelligence database.
TLDR: you can benefit from our continuous and accurate screening of this well-furnished but complex database, spare yourself the trouble and focus instead on developing your own business. Does that sound good? Contact us via our custom services page.
The first objective of our systematic screening is to identify calls for tenders but there are many other side benefits to it - many from contract award notices. Learn more in the next paragraphs, with examples of interesting TED notices.
If you are an SME and you think this is only interesting for larger companies, give it a second thought. Calls for tenders for supplies or services contracts with an estimated value above 139'000 EUR must be published. ATC and airport-related contracts are very often above this value.
Identifying players and relationships
Do you know which organisations are buying ATM products and services?
The easy answer is "Air Navigation Services Providers". True, but there is more than that. In many countries, airports buy ATC services and equipment for their towers. In other cases, cities are in charge of running the local airports and they are the buyers.
The database also contains contract award notices and our screening tools systematically identify the winning suppliers. These can help you identify possible suppliers for your project, potential partners for your consortium or find out who your direct competitors are.
In this relatively small market, it is also important to identify long-lasting buyer-supplier relationships. Be it to attack them or not waste time taking part in calls for tenders for which the preferred, customary supplier has much greater chances than any other one.
Knowing the state of the market
The ATM and airports markets have long lifecycles. Building up long-durable relationships is the key to success. However, it makes no sense to liaise with a potential customer who just bought a product from your direct competitor and will likely stick to it for the next ten years. Thanks to our in-depth screening, we can easily and promptly tell you who bought what and from whom either recently or further in the past as the TED archive goes back in time 10 years.
Some buyers also publish “Prior Information Notices” (PIN) about their market research, in advance of the full call for tenders. This allows to establish relationships ahead of the procurement procedures. For example, the Dutch ANSP LVNL issued this notice early in their process of searching for a remote tower supplier: https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:495684-2018:TEXT:EN:HTML&src=0
Being on the trail of the right opportunity and eventually getting the well-timed and targeted advance notice that will get you to hit the target will be the best game-changer for your business.
Finding the value of products and services
With the TED database, the European Union wants to foster competition and transparency. The calls for tenders contain estimated contract values and the contract awards contain the price of the awarded contracts. The details of the pricing are not available but this provides interesting insights anyway. Buyers can use it to know what price range to expect and for sellers, it helps knowing the price range of competitors.
What is, for example, the price for air traffic control services at for five regional airports: https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:014214-2020:HTML:EN:HTML or how much did the French ANSP DSNA for their new ground radars provided by SAAB Sensis: https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:500368-2018:TEXT:EN:HTML&src=0 - this and more can be found in the TED database.
Large projects and trends
Analysing calls for tenders in detail is a great way to identify larger projects and trends. Even if they are not directly relevant for you, there is a lot of context information available to improve your overview of the market. Large projects are often broken down into parts and published in several different notices and spotting the first one helps being on the dot when the ones that are relevant for you get published.
For example, Leipzig airport will renew one of their runways. Such a large project is split in various notices:
Another example of a call for tenders which will certainly have a handful of follow-ups: DFS builds a new logistics center: https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:170165-2020:HTML:EN:HTML
The calls for tenders also reveals some long term plans. For example, the Irish Aviation Authority awarded a consulting contract to KMPG to help building a commercial division selling ATM knowledge : https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:017223-2020:HTML:EN:HTML
Monitoring the race for contracts
Some tender procedures are rockier than others. Here again, the transparency promoted via the TED database can help. It also encourages all actors to play fair, knowing what will be published.
Look for example at the NAVIAIR call for tenders for a remote tower and approach center in Billund, Denmark. This one went into four steps:
- The initial call for tenders: https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:053914-2019:TEXT:EN:HTML
- Cancellation because of Indra Navia's claim: https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:217161-2019:TEXT:EN:HTML
- New tender: https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:236021-2019:TEXT:EN:HTML
- Award to DFS AEROSENSE: https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:105205-2020:TEXT:EN:HTML
Surprises
Last but not least, some notices are simply surprising. This can be because things happen outside of your network and a good screening of the notices is a nice fallback. Sometimes projects are launched and they are simply unexpected. Do you remember BER, the new Berlin airport which is not open yet? They just launched a call for tenders for... an upgrade of the baggage handling system: https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:020435-2020:HTML:EN:HTML
Who would have thought it?
How this can help you
Which part of this post is the most interesting for you? If you look for opportunities, suppliers, partnerships or more, our custom market intelligence services are for you. Let us do the searching and filtering to get more time to focus on your business development. Get in touch today via this page and let us start today!
Andrej Nemec contributed to this article and reviewed it.
