📚Maintaining your own library of procurement data

In the previous topics, we've looked at where procurement data is available and noted the problems that are inherent in the way that RFPs, RFQs and the like are shared. Reading one PDF is straightforward, trying to analyse information from several similar PDFs is very hard.

Many tenders are just a few pages long, some have multiple technical documents and appendices (like this 35 document package from Eskom).

For this reason, as you work with procurement documents, it is highly likely that you will want to create your own system for storing procurement data which is both searchable and comparable. OpenUP, for example, takes information published by National Treasury around Covid-19 procurement efforts and makes it easily accessible and downloadable in CSV format at Keep The Receipts.

This kind of project can require specialised resources, but enabling others to build on your work helps to promote transparency and scrutiny of the procurement process. You'll find some advice on acquiring data in this lesson.

A library could be as simple as a shared folder of documents on Dropbox or Google Drive, or it could be an SQL database or CSV file.