You lost the tender on price. The clues were already public.

The award is published. The lot you bid on has gone to a competitor with a lower offer. The award decision shows the contract value and, when the financial bids are published too, you can work back to the winner's unit price and, in some cases, to the prices of the other bidders.

That is when the uncomfortable question comes up: could you have known that price in advance? Not the price of the tender that just closed. The price at which the same authority had already bought similar supplies, or the price at which the same competitor had won comparable lots at other hospitals.

That data was already public, and often available to anyone. The problem was bringing it together before preparing the bid, not after losing the tender.

Not all tender information is equally accessible. There is a European layer, which applies to tenders above the EU thresholds; there are national rules, which distinguish between data public to anyone and documents available to bidders; and there is a further level of detail that depends on what individual authorities choose to publish.

For tenders above the EU thresholds, Directive 2014/24/EU (Article 50 and Annex V, Part D) requires contracting authorities to send, within 30 days of the conclusion of the contract, a contract award notice that is published in the Official Journal of the European Union and available to anyone on TED. The notice states the value of the successful tender, or the highest and lowest tenders taken into consideration. The authority may withhold some information, for example where publishing it would harm the legitimate commercial interests of an economic operator.

National rules add further layers. Take Italy: the Public Contracts Code (Article 28) requires publication, among other data, of the successful bidder and the award amount through the National Public Contracts Database run by ANAC, the Italian anti-corruption authority. This is valuable information, but it does not include the unit price of each product.

Bidders see more. Article 36 requires the winning bid, the tender minutes and the procedure records to be made available through the e-procurement platform to all candidates and tenderers not definitively excluded, while the top five in the ranking also get access to each other's bids. Parts recognised as confidential, such as technical or trade secrets, remain protected.

Then there is the detail contained in the award decisions and attachments that authorities publish. In Italian healthcare there is no shortage of examples: ASL Roma 3 reports unit price, quantity and value per lot; ULSS 8 Berica lists the bids of all competitors, not just the winner's; ASL Salerno, in a price revision decision, breaks the economics down item by item. Even when the decision itself only shows amounts per lot, the attachments can contain unit prices, as in the case of ASL Roma 5.

It is not a rule, though: availability and level of detail vary from one authority to another.

The unit price, in other words, can be public even to those who did not bid. The real problem is knowing where to look for it and how to compare it.

Tender results do get looked at. Monitoring them consistently, however, takes resources: people who read award decisions and minutes authority by authority, reconstruct who bid what and at what price, and track the winners over time.

Companies without these resources in-house often look outside, relying on consultants or outsourced tendering services. Either way, coverage is limited by the number of tenders that can be followed.

On top of that, the sources are scattered: a separate online notice board for each authority, PDFs in different formats, scanned attachments. And what gets collected often ends up in files and spreadsheets that are hard to query exactly when they are needed, while you prepare the next bid. The clue is there, but not at hand.

This is not a matter of curiosity: an off-market price can cost you in both directions. Too high, and you risk losing competitiveness and the contract. Too low, and you may win while leaving margin on the table that is hard to recover over the whole term of the contract.

Gaps like these become visible when the award decision is published, after the tender has closed. Those who have already analysed the prices of previous awards, on the other hand, prepare the new bid on a more solid basis for assessing their positioning.

The base price alone does not help much either: in the same tender, one lot can close almost at the starting price and another at a much steeper discount. Knowing the results of comparable tenders changes where you start from.

The shift comes when award history is already available while you prepare the bid: not as an archive of PDFs, but as reconciled, interlinked data. Comparable products across different tenders, the same authority followed over time, the same competitors found across lots and regions.

That way, the questions that matter get answered faster. At what price did this authority last award similar supplies? Who wins in this category, and with what discounts? How does the price of comparable products vary across markets? The information can be analysed by product, authority, market and competitor, and cross-referenced.

This is where Predictive Analytics comes in: the FBK module that combines historical data and predictive models to identify trends, analyse tender outcomes and support pricing strategies. The result is a bid built on concrete data, not just on estimates and intuition.

Many of the clues for your next bid have already been published. See how Predictive Analytics turns them into pricing insight or request a demo.