Public Contracts Discovery Platform

The Challenge

The commercial team faced daily bottlenecks in public tender discovery:

Fragmented discovery: Manual scanning of DRE across spreadsheets and bookmarks with no unified view.
No pipeline visibility: No way to prioritize, assign, or monitor proposal statuses in one place.
Time-sensitive deadlines: Repetitive checks with high risk of missing critical submission dates.
Manual opportunity tracking: Non-DRE leads scattered across emails and notes.

The Solution

We delivered a secure, multi-user web platform that centralizes and automates daily tender collection with a filterable, actionable CRM/Kanban view.

Tech Stack

Backend

Python / Flask

Scraping

BeautifulSoup / Scrapy

Database

PostgreSQL

Frontend

HTML/CSS/JS + HTMX

Auth & Security

bcrypt, rate-limiting

Notifications

SendGrid / SMTP

Key Features

Authentication & RBAC

Multi-user login with Admin, Commercial Manager, and Reader roles; password reset flows.

Automatic DRE Aggregation

Daily crawler ingests tenders (title, entity, location, dates, links) with deduplication by reference.

List, Filters & Search

Filter by buyer, location, phase, date ranges; quick/exact search; default sort by deadline.

Kanban Workflow

Drag-and-drop pipeline with configurable columns: To review → In analysis → In progress → Submitted → Won/Lost.

Manual Opportunities

Create/edit opportunities with same fields; origin marked "Manual" for non-DRE leads.

Email Digests & Alerts

Daily summaries of new entries; D-7/D-3/D-1 deadline reminders per owner.

Security & Ops

HTTPS, bcrypt hashing, login rate-limiting; daily DB & file backups; respectful crawling with robots.txt compliance.

Opportunity Detail View

Full metadata + DRE link, internal notes, tags, and file attachments.

The Results

100%

Relevant DRE coverage (MVP target)

<24h

Refresh latency for new tenders

99.5%

Platform availability uptime

Measurable

Reduction in daily triage time

The MVP delivered in just 2 weeks transformed the commercial team's workflow. Daily manual scanning was replaced by an automated, centralized system that ensures no opportunity is missed.

With RBAC, the team can now collaborate securely, track proposals through a visual Kanban, and receive timely deadline alerts—all within a single, unified platform.

"Before, we spent 2–3 hours every morning just combing through DRE. Now, we log in, see everything filtered and sorted by deadline, and can focus on actually preparing proposals. The deadline alerts alone have saved us from missing critical submissions."

CM

Commercial Manager

Public Procurement Team

Process & Timeline

1

Discovery & Planning (Day 1–2)

Mapped current workflow, DRE structure, and user roles. Defined MVP scope: automatic DRE aggregation, RBAC, Kanban, and deadline alerts.

2

Backend & Crawler (Day 3–7)

Built Python/Flask backend with PostgreSQL; implemented DRE crawler with deduplication; set up auth & RBAC.

3

Frontend & Kanban (Day 8–11)

Designed and built responsive UI with list/filters, drag-and-drop Kanban, and opportunity detail views.

4

Notifications & Security (Day 12–13)

Integrated email digests and deadline alerts; hardened security (HTTPS, rate-limiting, bcrypt); configured daily backups.

✓

Testing & Launch (Day 14)

User testing with commercial team; final fixes; deployed to production with monitoring and support handoff.