Original publication date: February, 2009

Introducing BidCenter

Our Bid Match Program is no slouch when it comes to searching out bids for your clients. Daily, we post thousands of bids across our various databases. But we can only find bids that are available electronically. If a small government agency has no online forum for its bid opportunities, OutreachSystems has no way of accessing them. But you do! As a procurement specialist, you’re familiar with every agency in your area that has purchasing needs, regardless of how their bid opportunities are published. That’s why we’ve just launched BidCenter, an online interface that allows any center to publish bid opportunities on behalf of any government agency. The bid opportunities that you enter into BidCenter are searched and distributed to your clients like any other bid opportunity that resides in OutreachSystems’ database.

Does all this sound familiar? If you’ve been a long-time client of ours, you might remember OpenMarket. OpenMarket was a Windows-based application that we created long ago to do much the same thing. It shipped on the WinCATS CD and we even have a couple of programs that still use it. Of course, nothing beats a convenient online interface so we expect BidCenter to quickly gain a larger user base than OpenMarket ever had.

Try It Out

It’s really easy and it’s free. You can access BidCenter from OutreachSystems’ online customer service Web site, called eService, which is located at www.outreachsystems.com/eservice. eService requires a login and, if you don’t know yours, you can get it from your center’s database administrator or by calling OutreachSystems.

Once you’ve entered eService, select the BidCenter link to get started. The interface is pretty self-explanatory, but here’s a highlight of some of the neat features:

You can create templates for faster data entry
You can view bids previously entered by your center

Note: As of now, you need to manually log in to eService, but once you have WebCATS build 425, you’ll be able to auto-log into eService from within WebCATS, using the new Help|eService link.

Helpful Tips

Who better to help you write good bid opportunities than the person who helps you find good bid opportunities? Check out Karen’s Column on the following page for some helpful tips on how to compose good bid opportunities from BidCenter. In addition, we have an FAQ devoted to the ins ands outs of BidCenter. You can find it here.