Every SME in public procurement knows the feeling: endless searching, countless tabs open, and too many hours gone before the first page of a proposal is even written.
Tendering isn’t just about money, it’s about time. And time is the one resource smaller teams can’t afford to waste.
Across Europe, inefficiencies in the procurement process consume thousands of working hours each year. According to the OECD, administrative complexity and duplication add 20–30% in extra costs for both buyers and suppliers. For SMEs, those “costs” are mostly measured in hours, hours that could have gone into winning more business or serving customers.
This article looks at where that time goes, how much of it is lost before bidding even begins, and what it means for Europe’s competitiveness. Because when smaller suppliers spend more time chasing opportunities than creating value, everyone loses.
The hidden cost of time in public procurement
In procurement, costs are usually calculated in euros. But for SMEs, the more significant expense is measured in hours.
Every missed alert, repeated search, or document update eats away at the one thing small teams can’t multiply: time.
For many, tendering has become a full-time job that starts long before the first bid is submitted.
The unseen resource SMEs can’t afford to lose
A Bid Manager’s day often looks busy but unproductive, hours spent logging into different portals, applying filters, downloading files, and checking if anything new appeared since yesterday. You can read more about this in our blog post “A day in the life of a bid manager: Why tender hunting still feels like 2010”.
While large companies have dedicated staff or automation tools, SMEs rely on multitasking. The same people who manage sales, delivery, and operations also handle tenders.
The OECD found that administrative inefficiency can inflate procurement-related workloads by 20–30%, adding hidden costs that rarely appear in budgets.
For small suppliers, that inefficiency often means missed opportunities or burnout.
Why it matters more for SMEs
SMEs live by opportunity cost. Every hour spent hunting tenders is an hour not spent improving a proposal or nurturing a client relationship.
When tendering becomes too time-consuming, many simply stop participating.
The European Commission acknowledges that administrative barriers remain one of the main reasons SMEs stay underrepresented in public contracts.
Time inefficiency isn’t just a nuisance - it’s a structural barrier to growth.
Understanding where those hours go is the first step toward reclaiming them.
Where the hours go: Mapping the tendering bottlenecks
Ask any SME how long it takes to prepare a bid, and you’ll hear numbers ranging from days to weeks. But most of that time isn’t spent writing proposals, it’s lost in the steps that come before.
From searching to internal alignment, inefficiency creeps in at every stage.
Search and discovery
The biggest time sink comes before a single document is opened.
SMEs spend hours (sometimes days) monitoring multiple portals to find new tenders. Each platform has different filters, login systems, and update schedules.
The European Court of Auditors found that the EU’s 2,000+ tender portals remain one of the key barriers to efficiency and equal access.
Inconsistent filters, missing alerts, and duplicate listings make discovery one of the least efficient stages of the process.
Document collection and review
Once a relevant opportunity is found, the next hurdle begins - downloading, reviewing, and managing documentation.
Many portals still require manual downloads and logins for each file, and tender documents are often updated without notice.
Version control becomes chaotic, especially when files are stored in shared drives or email chains. A single missed update can invalidate an entire bid.
Internal coordination
Even after finding the right tender, aligning internal stakeholders is another bottleneck.
Finance, delivery, and legal teams need input, but information is often scattered across emails, Excel sheets, and attachments.
Every clarification takes time. Every miscommunication adds risk.
By the end of the week, Bid Managers spend more time organising tenders than competing for them.
And that’s before they even start writing.
Quantifying the problem: How much time is really lost
Everyone agrees that tendering takes time, but few teams actually track how much.
Once you quantify it, the scale of inefficiency becomes hard to ignore.
What the research says
The OECD estimates that administrative inefficiency and duplicated effort add 20–30% in hidden costs across the procurement lifecycle.
For suppliers, those costs translate directly into time.
The European Court of Auditors (ECA) has noted that slow, inconsistent procurement systems reduce supplier participation and create barriers to entry, particularly for SMEs.
If inefficiency costs governments billions, it costs SMEs the one thing they can’t get back: hours.
The SME reality
A typical SME spends between 80 and 150 staff hours per tender, much of it before submission.
Half of that time is consumed by manual searching, document handling, and internal coordination.
Let’s put that into perspective:
A small business submitting 10 tenders a year could lose more than 1,000 working hours, the equivalent of six months of full-time work, before even competing.
That’s not inefficiency. That’s lost opportunity.
Until the process becomes faster, simpler, and more connected, SMEs will keep paying the same price, in time, not just money.
The domino effect: How inefficiency hurts everyone
When SMEs lose time, the entire procurement ecosystem feels it.
Inefficiency doesn’t just drain small businesses, it weakens competition, limits innovation, and reduces the value that public contracts deliver to taxpayers.
Fewer bids, lower competition
Complex, time-consuming processes discourage participation.
According to the European Court of Auditors, the share of single-bid tenders in the EU rose from 23.5% in 2011 to 41.8% in 2021 (ECA, 2023).
When fewer suppliers compete, prices rise and quality falls.
Simpler, faster tendering processes, particularly for SMEs, are proven to increase both competition and value for money.
Burnout and missed innovation
For SMEs, every inefficient hour adds stress to already overstretched teams.
Administrative burden leads to burnout, late submissions, or withdrawal from the process altogether.
That’s not just a loss for businesses, it’s a loss for buyers.
SMEs are often more agile, innovative, and specialised than larger competitors. When they opt out, the public sector loses access to fresh ideas and local expertise.
The European Commission continues to emphasise SME inclusion as a key pillar of procurement reform. But without tackling time inefficiency, inclusion remains a goal, not a reality.
The next step is clear: to fix procurement, Europe must first fix its relationship with time.
From hours to impact: Fixing the tendering time trap
Time inefficiency in procurement isn’t inevitable, it’s a design problem.
The systems, data, and tools that suppliers rely on were built for transparency, not usability. To unlock real value, Europe needs to treat time as the most important performance metric in public procurement.
Automating the search and admin layer
Automation doesn’t replace people, it gives them time back.
By aggregating tenders from multiple sources, applying relevance scoring, and syncing documentation automatically, digital tools can reduce hours of manual work.
When suppliers receive only relevant tenders, already filtered by fit, region, and criteria, the pre-bid phase becomes manageable.
Efficiency isn’t about doing more; it’s about eliminating what doesn’t matter.
Standardising data and access
A major share of wasted time comes from inconsistency, every portal has its own format, rules, and requirements.
Unified standards, APIs, and multilingual search functions can cut duplication dramatically.
The EU Public Procurement Data Space (PPDS) is one step toward that goal, aiming to connect fragmented systems and simplify cross-border access.
Standardisation doesn’t just save time; it creates fairness.
The bigger picture
When SMEs waste less time searching, everyone benefits.
- Buyers gain more qualified bidders
- Governments get stronger competition and better value
- Suppliers finally have the capacity to innovate and grow
The next frontier in procurement reform isn’t transparency, it’s productivity.
Because every hour an SME spends fighting the system is an hour Europe loses in potential.
It’s time to stop counting bids and start counting the hours that matter.
