# Public procurement glossary > 53 procurement terms defined: procedures, the paperwork that disqualifies bids, and the official portals from TED and BASE.gov to Etimad, PNCP, SECOP II and UNGM. Source: https://trinta.ai/glossary · Format: Markdown mirror of that page · Language: en ## The procedure How a public contract is advertised, competed and awarded, and the words each stage goes by. ### Public tender A public tender is the process by which a government body, state company or publicly funded organisation invites suppliers to compete for a contract. It is advertised on an official portal, run to published rules, and awarded on published criteria. The word is used for both the process and the notice that opens it. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#public-tender ### Contract notice A contract notice is the official advertisement that opens a public tender. It states what is being bought, by whom, the estimated value, the procedure type, the award criteria and the deadline for responses. In the EU, above-threshold contract notices must be published in TED as well as nationally. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#contract-notice ### Open procedure An open procedure is a public tender in which any interested supplier may submit a bid directly, with no pre-selection stage. It is the default in most systems and the most accessible route for a supplier without an existing relationship with the buyer, because qualification and evaluation happen in a single round. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#open-procedure ### Restricted procedure A restricted procedure is a two-stage public tender: suppliers first request to participate and are assessed against selection criteria, then only those shortlisted are invited to bid. It is used where the buyer expects a large field or a technically demanding contract, and it rewards suppliers who track notices early enough to catch the first stage. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#restricted-procedure ### Negotiated procedure A negotiated procedure is a public tender in which the buyer may discuss terms with bidders rather than accept fixed submissions. It is permitted only in defined circumstances, such as a failed open procedure or a contract whose specification cannot be set in advance, and its use must usually be justified in the notice. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#negotiated-procedure ### Direct award A direct award is a public contract given to a supplier without a competitive procedure. It is lawful only in narrow cases, typically below a low value threshold, in genuine urgency, or where a single supplier can technically perform the work. Direct awards are published after the fact and are a common ground for challenge when the justification is thin. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#direct-award ### Framework agreement A framework agreement is a contract that sets the terms under which a buyer may place orders with one or more suppliers over a period, usually two to four years, without running a new tender each time. Winning a place on a framework is the entry ticket; the revenue arrives through call-offs made under it. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#framework-agreement ### Call-off A call-off is an individual order placed under an existing framework agreement. Depending on the framework's rules it is either awarded directly to the ranked supplier or mini-competed among the suppliers already on it. Call-offs are where framework revenue actually appears, and they are often published in far less detail than the original notice. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#call-off ### Prior information notice (PIN) A prior information notice, or PIN, is a signal published by a buyer that it intends to tender something later, before any contract notice exists. It is not an invitation to bid. Its value to a supplier is time: a PIN can precede the real tender by months, which is long enough to build a partnership or a compliant product configuration. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#prior-information-notice ### Re-tender A re-tender is the new competition run when an existing contract or framework reaches the end of its term. Because most public contracts have a fixed duration published at award, the date a competitor's contract expires is predictable, which makes re-tenders the most forecastable opportunity in public procurement. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#re-tender ### Award notice An award notice is the official publication recording who won a public contract, usually with the value and often the number of bids received. Award notices are the raw material of competitive intelligence: read across a buyer, they reveal preferred suppliers, realistic price levels and the expiry dates that will drive the next re-tender. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#award-notice ### Standstill period A standstill period is the mandatory pause between the award decision and contract signature, during which unsuccessful bidders may challenge the outcome. In the EU it is typically ten days. It is short and it is strict: a supplier who wants to contest an award has to decide inside that window, which is why award monitoring has to be automatic. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#standstill-period ### Procurement challenge A procurement challenge is a formal contest of a public award, on grounds such as an unlawful direct award, a misapplied criterion, an arithmetic error in scoring, or a specification written around one supplier. Challenges run to hard deadlines measured from the award notice, and they succeed or fail on documentary grounds rather than on how unfair the outcome felt. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#procurement-challenge ## The paperwork The documents that decide whether a bid is scored or thrown out before it is read. ### Tender documents Tender documents are the full pack a buyer publishes alongside a contract notice: the specification, the terms of reference, the draft contract, the response templates and the annexes. The notice states that a tender exists; the documents state what would actually have to be delivered, and they routinely contradict the summary in the notice. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#tender-documents ### Specification A specification is the technical description of what a buyer requires, and it is where a tender is won or made unwinnable. Specifications may be functional, describing an outcome, or prescriptive, describing a product. A prescriptive specification that matches one manufacturer's datasheet is a recognised ground for challenge in most systems. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#specification ### Award criteria Award criteria are the published factors on which bids are scored, with the weight given to each. The critical detail is the split between price and quality: a contract scored 70 percent on price is a different commercial proposition from the same contract scored 30 percent on price, and the weights are always in the documents rather than the notice summary. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#award-criteria ### MEAT (Most Economically Advantageous Tender) MEAT, the most economically advantageous tender, is the award basis under which a contract goes to the best combination of price and quality rather than to the lowest price alone. It is the default in EU procurement. Under MEAT the published weightings decide the strategy, because a strong technical bid can beat a cheaper one only where quality carries real weight. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#meat ### Selection criteria Selection criteria are the minimum requirements a supplier must meet to be eligible at all: turnover, insurance levels, relevant references, certifications, and the absence of exclusion grounds. They are pass or fail and are assessed before quality scoring. Most disqualifications happen here, on evidence a supplier could have prepared in advance. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#selection-criteria ### Exclusion grounds Exclusion grounds are the circumstances that bar a supplier from a public contract regardless of the merits of its bid, such as unpaid taxes or social contributions, insolvency, certain convictions, or serious professional misconduct. They are checked with official certificates, and an expired tax clearance certificate disqualifies a bid as surely as a missing price. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#exclusion-grounds ### ESPD (European Single Procurement Document) The ESPD, or European Single Procurement Document, is a standard self-declaration in which a supplier confirms it meets the selection criteria and faces no exclusion grounds, without attaching every certificate up front. Only the likely winner is asked for the underlying evidence. In Portugal the same instrument is the DEUCP, and it has replaced the old Anexo I declaration. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#espd ### DEUCP (Documento Europeu Único de Contratação Pública) The DEUCP is the Portuguese instance of the European Single Procurement Document, the self-declaration a bidder submits in place of full qualification evidence. Under the current Código dos Contratos Públicos it replaces the Anexo I declaration that older guidance still references, which is a common and disqualifying mistake in Portuguese bids prepared from outdated templates. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#deucp ### Prequalification Prequalification is an assessment of a supplier's eligibility and capacity that happens before, or separately from, bidding on a specific contract. It appears as the first stage of a restricted procedure and as standing supplier registration in systems such as South Africa's CSD. Prequalifying early converts a future tender from a scramble into a submission. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#prequalification ### Bid bond A bid bond, or tender guarantee, is a financial instrument a bidder lodges to guarantee it will not withdraw its offer or refuse to sign if it wins. It is usually a bank guarantee for a small percentage of the tender value. Bid bonds are common in African, Middle Eastern and multilateral procurement, and arranging one takes bank time a short deadline may not allow. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#bid-bond ### Performance bond A performance bond is a guarantee lodged by the winning supplier to secure delivery under the contract, typically 5 to 10 percent of contract value, released on completion. It is distinct from a bid bond, which secures the offer itself. The requirement and its percentage are in the tender documents, and they change the working capital a contract actually consumes. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#performance-bond ### Abnormally low tender An abnormally low tender is a bid priced so far below the others, or below the buyer's estimate, that the buyer must ask the bidder to explain it before accepting. If the explanation does not hold, the bid must be rejected. The mechanism protects both the buyer and honest bidders, and it is a recognised ground for challenging an award to an implausible price. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#abnormally-low-tender ## The systems The official portals where public tenders are actually published, region by region. ### TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) TED, Tenders Electronic Daily, is the European Union's official journal supplement for public procurement. Every above-threshold contract from the 27 member states must be published there. TED is authoritative but partial: below-threshold contracts, which are the majority by count, appear only on national portals, so TED alone understates a supplier's real EU opportunity. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#ted ### Threshold A threshold is the contract value above which EU-wide advertising becomes compulsory. Below it, a buyer publishes only under national rules, often on a domestic portal alone. Thresholds are revised every two years and differ by contract type and buyer. For a smaller supplier the below-threshold band is usually where the winnable work sits, because the field is thinner. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#threshold ### BASE.gov BASE.gov is Portugal's official public contracts portal, run by IMPIC, where contract and award data for Portuguese public procurement is published and made available as open data. It is the authoritative record of what was awarded and to whom, which makes it the starting point for competitive analysis in the Portuguese market as well as for finding live opportunity. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#base-gov ### CCP (Código dos Contratos Públicos) The CCP, Código dos Contratos Públicos, is the Portuguese public contracts code: the law governing how public contracts are advertised, competed, awarded and challenged in Portugal. It sets the procedure types, the deadlines, the qualification regime and the grounds and windows for contesting an award, including how working days are counted. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#ccp ### Etimad Etimad is Saudi Arabia's national government procurement and financial platform, through which public buyers publish tenders and manage supplier transactions. It is the single most important source for suppliers targeting Saudi public spending, including the programmes running under Vision 2030, and it requires registration before opportunities can be seen in full. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#etimad ### PNCP (Portal Nacional de Contratações Públicas) The PNCP, Portal Nacional de Contratações Públicas, is Brazil's national public procurement portal, the mandatory publication point for federal, state and municipal contracting under the current Brazilian procurement law. It carries an open API, which makes Brazil one of the more machine-readable large procurement markets in the world. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#pncp ### SECOP II (Sistema Electrónico de Contratación Pública) SECOP II is Colombia's electronic public procurement system, operated by Colombia Compra Eficiente, through which public entities run tenders end to end and publish awards. It is the mandatory transactional platform for Colombian public buyers, so a supplier targeting Colombia registers there rather than monitoring entity websites individually. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#secop-ii ### Mercado Público Mercado Público is Chile's national public procurement platform, operated by ChileCompra, where state bodies publish and award purchases. It is one of the longest-running centralised procurement systems in Latin America and the required route to Chilean public contracts, including the framework catalogues that carry a large share of routine state buying. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#mercado-publico ### GHANEPS (Ghana Electronic Procurement System) GHANEPS, the Ghana Electronic Procurement System, is Ghana's national e-procurement platform, through which public entities advertise tenders and receive bids electronically. Registration is required to participate, and it is the authoritative publication point for Ghanaian public opportunity that would otherwise be scattered across individual ministry websites. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#ghaneps ### eTenders and CSD (eTenders Portal and Central Supplier Database) South Africa's eTenders portal publishes government tender opportunities, and the Central Supplier Database, or CSD, is the single registry a supplier must join to do business with the South African state. The two work together: eTenders shows the opportunity, CSD registration is the precondition for bidding on it, and CSD registration takes time to complete. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#csd ### eTenders eTenders is South Africa's national tender publication portal, run by National Treasury, carrying advertised opportunities from national departments, provinces and public entities. It is the official notice surface for South African public procurement, paired with the Central Supplier Database, which handles supplier registration and vetting. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#etenders-za ### BPP (Bureau of Public Procurement) The BPP, Bureau of Public Procurement, is Nigeria's federal procurement regulator, setting the rules for and publishing federal public contracting alongside the NOCOPO reporting platform. Nigeria also runs state-level procurement systems, so federal monitoring alone misses a large share of the country's actual opportunity. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#bpp ### ProZorro ProZorro is Ukraine's public e-procurement system, built on an open-data architecture in which all tender and award data is published and accessible through an API. It is widely cited as a transparency benchmark, and its openness makes Ukrainian procurement unusually easy to monitor programmatically compared with most national systems. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#prozorro ### UNGM (United Nations Global Marketplace) UNGM, the United Nations Global Marketplace, is the common supplier portal for the UN system, where agencies publish procurement notices and suppliers register once to be visible to many of them. UN procurement runs to its own rules rather than to national procurement law, and registration is a prerequisite rather than a formality. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#ungm ### Multilateral procurement Multilateral procurement is public buying run by international organisations such as the UN agencies and the development banks, funded from pooled member contributions rather than a single national budget. It follows the funder's rules, is usually conducted in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese, and is open to suppliers from member countries regardless of where the project sits. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#multilateral-procurement ### Development bank procurement Development bank procurement is the contracting done under projects financed by institutions such as the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. The borrowing government runs the tender but the bank's procurement rules apply, and the project pipeline is published long before the tenders are, which makes it the most predictable large-contract flow in emerging markets. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#development-bank-procurement ## Words that travel differently Terms that mean something precise in one procurement system and nothing, or something else, in another. Where they belong is part of the definition. ### L1, L2, L3 (lowest, second lowest, third lowest bidder) L1, L2 and L3 rank bidders by price in Indian and wider South Asian public tendering: L1 is the compliant bid at the lowest price, L2 the next, and so on. The L stands for lowest, and being L1 is the usual precondition for award in a price-decided tender, not a guarantee of it, because the bid must also clear the technical evaluation. In tenders where the government sells rather than buys, the same convention runs upward as H1 for the highest offer. European and Latin American systems rank on the award criteria as a whole rather than on price alone, so they have no equivalent word. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#l1-l2-l3 ### PAC (Proprietary Article Certificate) A Proprietary Article Certificate is the document an Indian public buyer issues to justify buying a specific manufacturer's item without competition, on the stated ground that only that manufacturer makes what the requirement needs. It is the paperwork behind a single-source purchase, and it is where a competitor looks first when a contract is awarded without a tender, because the certificate has to name the reason the item is proprietary. The equivalent idea elsewhere is the negotiated procedure without prior publication in the European Union, and the ajuste direto by material criterion in Portugal. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#pac ### Limited bidding Limited bidding is any procurement where only suppliers the buyer invites may submit an offer, as against open tendering where anyone qualified may. The name changes by system: Limited Tender Enquiry in India, restricted procedure in the European Union, consulta prévia in Portugal, selección abreviada in Colombia. What they share is that the competition is real but the field is closed, which is why single-bid rates measured across a whole register mean little unless the limited procedures are separated out, and why TRINTA's barometers count them apart. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#limited-bidding ### Find a Tender Service (FTS, United Kingdom) Find a Tender Service is the United Kingdom's national notice service for public contracts above threshold, which took over that role for UK procurement after the country left the European Union and stopped publishing to TED. A supplier watching TED alone therefore stops seeing British contracts, which is the single most common coverage gap for European exporters who set up their monitoring before that change. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#find-a-tender-service ### e-procurement e-procurement is the conduct of a public purchase through an electronic platform rather than on paper: the notice, the tender documents, the questions, the submission and often the evaluation. Nearly every system named in this glossary is an e-procurement platform, which is why the word is more useful as a category than as a search term. The practical question it hides is which platforms a given buyer actually uses, because most countries run several and a supplier watching one sees a fraction of the market. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#e-procurement ## How TRINTA uses these words Terms specific to this product, defined so an external reader can use them precisely. ### Tender intelligence Tender intelligence is the practice of monitoring public procurement sources, judging each opportunity against what a specific company sells, and carrying the good ones through to a decision. It is distinguished from tender alerting, which matches keywords and forwards results, by the addition of scoring, document retrieval and outcome tracking. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#tender-intelligence ### Keyword profile A keyword profile, in TRINTA, is the multilingual model of what a client sells, built by reading that client's website and product range. It is what every incoming notice is judged against, and it is per client rather than shared. Because it is multilingual, a product described in English is still matched to a notice published in French or Portuguese. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#keyword-profile ### Fit score A fit score, in TRINTA, is the 0 to 100 rating given to each tender against one client's keyword profile, reflecting what is being bought, where, at what scale, and how closely it matches what that client makes. The score is published with its reasoning rather than as a bare number, so a bid manager can overrule it on evidence. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#fit-score ### Radar Radar, in TRINTA, is the module that runs the daily scan: it sweeps the client's activated official sources every day and scores every notice for fit. It is also the name of the entry commercial scope, which covers one market. Radar is the layer everything else is built on, because nothing can be tracked that was not first found. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#radar ### Case file A case file, in TRINTA, is what a tender becomes once its procedure documents have been fetched and read: the real deadline, the value, the award criteria weights and the disqualifying traps, gathered on one page. It exists because the decisive facts are in the annexes rather than in the notice, and reading annexes by hand is what teams skip. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#case-file ### Signals Signals, in TRINTA, is the module for pre-tender intent: prior information notices, published project pipelines and frameworks aging toward their re-tender date, each traced to an official source. Signals answers a different question from Radar. Radar asks what is open now; Signals asks what will open, early enough to do something about it. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#signals ### Forensics Forensics, in TRINTA, is the module that dissects an award a client lost. A multi-lens audit hunts for grounds of challenge, an adversarial pass attacks each one, and the grounds that survive are delivered with the supporting quote, the legal article and the filing window. It is also used in reverse, to harden a bid against the same attacks before submission. Cite: https://trinta.ai/glossary#forensics --- Full site index for agents: https://trinta.ai/llms.txt · Whole site in one document: https://trinta.ai/llms-full.txt