Create a tender
From Tenders → Create you build the whole process in a multi-step wizard. The wizard autosaves every few seconds, so you can leave and come back to the draft later. At the end the tender is created as a draft; publishing it is a separate, explicit step.
1. General information
Title (required) and a description of the scope. The description includes the Improve with AI button, which rewrites it to make it clearer and more complete.
Tender type:
Open bid: bidders see each other's offers as they are submitted.
Sealed bid: all offers stay confidential until reception closes.
Question visibility (Q&A): Public (all bidders see the questions and answers) or Private (each supplier sees only their own).
Proposal mode: Unified (the supplier uploads everything in a single proposal) or Split into separate technical and commercial envelopes. The proposal mode cannot be changed once the tender is published.
AI answers in Q&A (optional): the system suggests draft answers to bidders' questions.
Link to a PR (optional): associate the tender with an existing purchase request.
2. Items
You define what is being tendered. Each item has a name and quantity (required), a unit of measure, a target price (internal reference, not shown to the supplier), specifications and a category (assigned by the AI and editable). There is a button to auto-categorize with AI.
If it is a service tender with no specific items (a retainer, a framework agreement, a consulting engagement), you can skip the items.
3. Dates and deadlines
Publication (optional): when it goes live.
Question deadline (optional): last day for queries.
Offer reception deadline (required): last day for proposals to be submitted.
Evaluation deadline (optional): target date to finish scoring.
Delivery address: chosen from your organization's addresses and shown to the bidders.
The wizard shows a timeline with the deadlines in order. Once the tender is published, dates can only be extended, never moved earlier.
4. Evaluation criteria
The dimensions on which offers are scored, each with its weight. Weights must add up to 100% (they redistribute automatically when you add or remove criteria). The defaults are: Price (40%), Technical compliance (25%), Delivery time (15%), Payment terms (10%) and Experience (10%), and you can edit them freely.
Each criterion has a share with the technical evaluator toggle: normally only the technical criteria are shared. The commercial ones (price, payment terms) stay outside the evaluator's scope so as not to bias their scoring.
5. Specification documents
You upload the terms, specifications and annexes that bidders can download from the portal (up to 20 files, 100 MB each, any format). If the technical detail is complex, generate the specification in Bid specifications and attach it here.
6. Suppliers to invite
You search for and select the suppliers. With Customize recipients you choose which contacts of each supplier are notified; by default the sales contacts and the main email are notified. The summary tells you how many recipients each invitation will reach.
7. Review
A summary of everything with a completeness checklist (general, items, dates, criteria, documents, suppliers). From there you can go back to any step to make corrections.
Create and publish
The final button creates the tender as a draft (not visible to suppliers). When you publish, which is a separate step from the tender detail, the following happens:
The invited suppliers receive the email with access to the portal.
The tender moves to Published and the defined schedule starts.
From that point on, relevant changes are communicated through circulars (see Manage a tender).
Best practices
Leave a real gap between the question deadline and the offer deadline: bidders need time to incorporate the answers.
A few well-defined criteria evaluate better than long lists with diluted weights.
Assign the technical evaluators and share only the technical criteria with them.