Public procurement in Europe was designed with one goal in mind: transparency. Every contract, big or small, should be visible to anyone who wants to compete.
In practice, that transparency created a new problem: fragmentation. Instead of one simple entry point, suppliers face a maze of more than 2,000 procurement portals across Europe, from TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) to national, regional, and sector-specific sites.
For SMEs, this isn’t transparency. It’s noise.
Instead of focusing on writing strong proposals, teams spend hours every week just trying to find the right tenders. The result? Missed deadlines, wasted resources, and an uneven playing field where only the largest companies can afford to monitor everything.
Fragmented procurement portals don’t just waste time. They actively reduce competition and that hurts buyers, taxpayers, and suppliers alike.
How the EU tender system became so fragmented?
This fragmentation didn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of how Europe built its procurement system.
At the top, there’s TED (Tenders Electronic Daily), the official EU platform. Any contract above certain thresholds must be published there. That was meant to create one central place.
But below that, every country has its own national portal. France has BOAMP, Germany has Bund.de, Spain has Plataforma de Contratación, and so on.
And it doesn’t stop there. Regions, cities, hospitals, universities, and even specific sectors often run their own portals. Each has its own design, filters, and rules.
The idea was transparency. The result is complexity. Instead of one system, we have thousands.
And this complexity comes at a cost. For SMEs, it means time lost, deadlines missed, and opportunities hidden in the noise.
Let’s look at that cost in detail.
The cost of procurement portal fragmentation for SMEs
For large corporations with full bid teams, monitoring dozens of portals is possible. For SMEs, it’s a different story.
Here’s what fragmentation means in practice:
- Wasted time: staff spend hours every week searching across platforms instead of preparing bids.
- Missed opportunities: if you don’t check the right portal at the right time, you may never see the tender.
- Overload: different formats, languages, and login requirements make the process confusing.
- Unfair disadvantage: only big companies can afford dedicated teams to manage this chaos.
The result? Many SMEs give up, or only see a small share of available tenders. Not because they lack capability, but because the system is fragmented.
And when SMEs step back, it doesn’t just hurt them. It hurts competition for everyone.
Let’s look at how fragmentation impacts the wider procurement market.
How fragmentation reduces competition in public procurement?
When suppliers can’t find tenders, they don’t bid. And when fewer suppliers bid, competition drops.
This shows up in three ways:
- Single-bid tenders: many EU tenders end with only one applicant. Less competition means less pressure on price and quality.
- Incumbent advantage: when SMEs drop out, large companies with resources dominate, even if they’re not the best option.
- Less innovation: new suppliers with fresh ideas never even get the chance to apply.
For buyers, this is bad news. Fewer bids mean less choice, higher costs, and slower progress. For taxpayers, it means less value for public money.
Procurement is supposed to be open and competitive. Fragmentation makes it the opposite.
The good news? There are already signs of change and ideas for how to fix this system.
Fixing the fragmented EU procurement system
The problem of fragmentation is well known in Brussels and across member states. Some work has already started:
- Public Procurement Data Space (PPDS): an EU initiative to make procurement data easier to access, connect, and analyse across countries.
- Machine-readable standards: moving away from PDFs toward structured data that can be searched and compared.
- Cross-border visibility: efforts to make it easier for SMEs to see and compete for tenders outside their home country.
These steps are positive. But they are slow. And until there is one unified system, suppliers, especially SMEs, need help navigating the complexity.
That’s where platforms built for suppliers come in. They don’t replace official portals, but they make them usable.
Let’s see how Tendify bridges this gap today.
How Tendify bridges the procurement fragmentation gap?
Tendify was built to solve the exact problem fragmentation creates: wasted time and missed opportunities.
Instead of asking SMEs to search across 2,000+ portals, Tendify:
- Aggregates tenders from all major EU, national, and regional sources.
- Uses AI to match tenders to each company’s profile.
- Scores relevance so SMEs know immediately which tenders are worth attention.
- Saves hours every week, freeing teams to focus on writing better bids, not searching.
It doesn’t replace official systems. It makes them usable.
By removing the noise, Tendify helps SMEs participate in more tenders, increases competition, and creates the level playing field procurement was meant to be.
Fragmentation is the problem. Focus is the solution.
Now let’s close with why this shift matters for Europe as a whole.
From fragmentation to focus: Why procurement needs to change, now?
Public procurement was built for transparency, but fragmentation has turned it into a barrier. Thousands of portals, scattered data, and inconsistent systems make it harder for SMEs to compete, and weaker competition means buyers and taxpayers lose too.
Europe doesn’t just need more tenders published. It needs those tenders to be findable, accessible, and relevant.
Until a unified system exists, suppliers need tools that cut through the noise. That’s where platforms like Tendify step in - not to replace procurement rules, but to make them work as intended.
For SMEs, that means less time searching and more time bidding. For buyers, it means stronger competition and better value.
Procurement should create access, not barriers. It’s time to move from fragmentation to focus.
