Continuing on our series of articles on the upcoming Monaqasat v3, we’d today like to talk about another great feature we’ve been working on - easily creating sub-tenders.

Up until today, when a main tender was posted, all the bidders would automatically get access to all of the bidder-specific time and cost-saving features of Monaqasat, such as being able to immediately access the tender documents or being informed of any updates to such documents, being able to ask questions and receive answers straight from the consultants and submitting their bids online, all in an easy, secure and efficient solution.

However, in order for them to properly fill their bids, contractors must divide the large tender into dozens of smaller packages and tender them out to sub-contractors, who in turn might also tender even smaller packages to suppliers.

As any contractor will no doubt confirm, this quickly becomes a massively complex operation, jeopardizing its capability to respond properly to tenders.

So we asked ourselves: why can’t contractors also benefit from the tender issuer benefits of using Monaqasat, such as added transparency, increased efficiency and our award-winning immediate reports?

Monaqasat v3 now makes this possible, and it’s as simple as clicking on a button.

How does it work?

The best way to explain how easy, efficient and time-saving this new feature is is to go through a normal flow:

• The main tender is created and posted normally, without any extra work from the Tender Issuer’s side.

• Once a bidder becomes part of the tender, he clicks on the ‘Create Sub-Tender’ button. Monaqasat will automatically create a new tender and link it up with the main tender.

• The bidder now simply goes to the Documents page, clicks on the ‘Import Documents’ and chooses which sections of which documents he would like to use for this particular sub-tender. He can import full documents, specific pages or items from the BoQ.

• He then shortlists any sub-contractor or supplier he would like to invite, either from the Main Company list or add them from a Company List he previously created.

• The sub-tender gets posted and all the sub-contractors and suppliers get immediate access to the documents, can ask for clarifications and are automatically notified of any updates to the documents, exactly as for a regular tender.

• Once the tender bidding is over, the contractor benefits from the Monaqasat advanced reports and can analyse the received prices like never possible before.

• Once he is happy with one price, he simply clicks on the ‘Merge’ button next to the bid he would like to use and Monaqasat will automatically fill the proper sections in the main BoQ.

Using these simple steps as many times as needed, the contractors can  now consolidate all their tendering needs into Monaqasat, thus eliminating confusion, reducing costs and increasing transparency.

New Bidding Options

Architects, Developers and Contractors however have largely different goals when tendering. Main tender issuers usually follow the very thorough and rigid tendering process, while contractors and sub-contractors need to be able to quickly get as many bids in as possible in order to get the best prices.

The good news is that we now support both flows equally, just by checking one or two checkboxes:

By enabling Officers and Auditors to see the prices immediately, Tender Issuers will not have to wait until the official bidding end date to get the prices and will thus be able to react much more quickly to the different prices they get from sub-contractors and bidders. 

Should they want to encourage competition between suppliers even more, Contractors can also enbale bidders to see what position they are in during the bidding process (without of course being made aware of the other bid prices) and to restrict the number of times they can un-submit and resubmit their prices. A lower number will mean that they be forced to submit better and more competitive prices early on.

As always, we’re very excited about these new features and would love to hear your opinions and feedback in the comments section below.

Today, we’re starting a new series of articles that will introduce the new features we’ve been working on for our next big release (v3), due out within a few short weeks.

The first feature we’d like to introduce is our answer to a question we often get asked by our customers “how can i quickly know what’s going on with my tenders?”.

There are actually different ways that this information can currently be found:

• By visiting the ‘My Notifications’ page
• By looking at the ‘latest events’ for each tender in the Tender index page

While these work for a limited number of tenders, we have found that they start loosing effectiveness once a company handles 50+ tenders. To fix that, we’ve been working on a totally revamped and dramatically more practical tender index page.

Activity Levels

The first major item we’ve added to this page is the activity graph on the right of each tender that immediately displays the relative activity level for this tender during the last 52 weeks.

Each bar represents the activity level for one week, starting on the right (rightmost bar represents the activity level for this week, leftmost bar represents the activity level 52 weeks ago). The more activity there has been during a specific week, the higher the bar will be.

In this particular screenshot, you can for example see that the tender for the Private Villa for Mr. Mohamad has not been very active in the last few weeks, and it might thus be worth analyzing more in details.

One more thing. If you look closely, you will also notice that each bar is actually composed of 2 colors: blue and gray.

This separation is made to immediately show what percentage of the activity of this tender is attributed to the tender issuer (colored in blue) and what percentage is caused by the other participating companies (colored in gray).

Using these graphs, you can now immediately know which tenders have been active recently and which ones need your attention.

Smart Tender Status Updates

The second feature we’re releasing is a smart tender status display, that displays the information most relevant to each tender, depending on its state and your role and it.

For example, if you were an executive officer in a posted tender, you would most likely be interested in knowing the time left until this bidding period is over, the number of bids you would have received and the number of open RfCs. As a bidder in the same tender, you’d however by much more interested in knowing how many documents or BOQ items you still have to fill.

To save even more time, clicking on any of the numbers on this status update will take you directly to the right page. Looking at the Corniche Hospital tender for example, clicking on the Document Set label would take you directly to the Tender Documents page and clicking on the Bids Submitted label would take you directly to the ‘Call for Bids’ page.

Conclusion

With these two features, we have no doubt that you will be able to focus much more quickly on your tenders, without ever needing to search for information anymore. It’ll be right there, in front of you.

This is however just the beginning  Monaqasat v3 has lots of other exciting features and we’ll be sharing more information about then during the next few days in this blog. Be sure to follow it to get all the latest news.

In the meantime, we want to hear your feedback. Share your opinions or feedback with us using the comments section below.

Only a few short months after launching Monaqasat.com 2.0, we are happy to introduce Monaqasat.com 2.1, a major new release that introduces some often requested features and optimizations, available starting today to all our existing customers.

Built-in Fast Document Viewer

Documents are a big part of the tender process and we continually strive to simplify that process as possible. Working with PDF documents had however a few major flaws until recently:

• clicking on documents would automatically download them to your device, something that could take a long time depending on the size of the documents,
• finding the history or review notes for specific versions required opening up different views or popups.

Of course, documents can still be downloaded for archival or offline viewing.

Company Performance Reports

Many of our clients use Monaqasat.com to manage dozens or hundreds of tenders simultaneously. Properly measuring performance of their organization becomes key. Monaqasat.com 2.1 introduces a new section called My Reports that allows Company Administrators and Auditors to quickly and precisely measure the performance of their company and users and evaluate whether tenders and documents are progressing at the anticipated rate.

Faster

Monaqasat.com’s goal is to help all its customers streamline their operations and reduce costs as much as possible. With that in mind, we constantly strive to make our service faster and more responsive. With this latest release, we have spent a lot of time optimizing some of the most important pages of the application such as the tasks page, the public tenders page and the tenders index page making them much faster to load and operate thanks to some intense caching.

For the more technologically inclined, we will be posting some more in-depth articles very soon on how we go about optimizing such pages along with some numbers.

However, we are not yet done optimizing the application and you can expect some more dramatic improvements in the upcoming releases.

Other Updates

Dozens of other improvements and optimizations have been included in Monaqasat.com 2.1, including:

• allowing all users to manage the frequency and type of notifications they receive by email,
• enabling company admins to set minimum durations for each phase as per their requirements,
• being able to bulk-download any set of documents or bidder documents in one click,
• allowing documenters to submit explanatory notes along with their documents, thus allowing them to better communicate with verifiers,
• …

We trust that every single one of our customers will benefit from the new release, and we will continue to improve our solutions and services based on your feedback and suggestions. So please use our customer support portal to suggest new features, report bugs or offer testimonials.

Dear Valued Customers,

Kindly be informed that Monaqasat.com will be under maintenance from Thursday, August 9th 2012 @ 10:00 PM until Friday, August 10th 2012 @ 9:00 AM in order to introduce exciting new features and improve its network infrastructure.

You will not be able to access the service during this time. However, all your data and documents will be kept secure and confidential and will be available once the system is back online.

We sincerely apologize for the temporary interruption of service during this period and are at your disposal should you have any queries.

Best Regards,

Your Monaqasat.com Team

In an effort to centralize all your tendering needs into one powerful and easy to use platform, we are very happy to officially launch today our ‘Public Tender Announcements’ section of Monaqasat.com.

By working closely with our key partners located throughout the MENA region, we have created the definitive tender listings, with an average of 300-500 tender announcements added on a daily basis from every country in the Middle East and North Africa.

The Monaqasat Public Tender Announcement service delivers fast and accurate information that you need to generate new leads and win contracts issued by all levels of Government as well Utilities Sector, Hospitals, Schools, Ports, NGO’s, etc. This full searchable database is updated 365 days a year, with close to 3,500 new opportunities being added each week.

While the main listing is available for FREE to all guests and users of Monaqasat.com, access to the detailed tender information is only available to registered members. To start finding new business opportunities, simply click on the ‘Find Tenders’ link in the main navigation menu.

Abu Dhabi/Beirut/Cairo/Salzburg, April 16, 2012 - Monaqasat.com is among the world’s top 40 in outstanding e-Content. Together with the world’s best e-content producers Monaqasat.com will receive UN-based World Summit Award (WSA) on April, 27 at Cairo ICT trade fair in the e-Business & Commerce. Monaqasat.com was selected from 460 projects and 105 countries by a Jury of ICT Experts in Hong Kong in June 2011.

Launched in 2009, Monaqasat.com is an online state-of-the-art eTendering solution/platform that enables users to work with their tenders in an easy, secure, cost and time efficient way. The platform contributes greatly to reducing administrative overhead for clients and increasing productivity. With over 700 active customers, Monaqasat has quickly grown to become the largest private provider of eTendering solutions in the United Arab Emirates, managing over USD 10 billion worth of bids since inception. The WSA jury recognized a great value of the project in contributing to the information society, providing a real added value service both to citizens and authorities, and at the same time strongly contributing to eradicate corruption and fraud thanks to a robust and well-designed procedure.

Besides Monaqasat.com, that will receive a World Summit Award in the e-Business & Commerce Category, 39 other projects from 26 countries will be honored in front of UN representatives, ICT ministries and the private sector. The WSA Winners’ Events will be hosted in the Middle East for the first time ever.

“With the winners from World Summit Award in e-Content, Cairo will host the best digital producers, interaction designers and content developers from all around the world. They will demonstrate the richness and diversity of the content industries. Cairo will be a special stage to highlight what can be done with modern ICT to develop local communities, national social strategies and meaningful jobs”, says WSA Chairman Peter A. Bruck.

The Winners were decided on by a Jury of ICT experts coming from all continents. Each UN Member State only nominates one product per category for the World Summit Award. Hence nominations resulted from national pre-selection awards prior to the international WSA Jury in Hong Kong in June 2011.

Hosted by the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) and Cairo ICT under the patronage of H.E. Mohamed Salem, Egypt Minister of Communications and Information Technology, the WSA winners will showcase the best digital e-Content projects worldwide. Between April 26 and April 29 Cairo will see “a global panopticum of knowledge and spirit in e-content”, Peter Bruck says.

The Programme contains workshops, conferences with UN attendance and above all the Winners’ Ceremony on April 27th at 9 p.m at the Cairo ICT. The Winners’ Events will be life streamed on www.wsis-award.org and tv.wupy.org.

About the WSA

The World Summit Award (WSA) is the global follow-up initiative of the United Nations World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) organized by the International Center for New Media (ICNM), Salzburg, Austria. It partners with the key UN organisations and agencies in the framework of the UN Geneva Agenda and the Tunis Action Plan and selects and promotes the world’s best e-Content and innovative ICT applications; to date more than 160 countries are actively involved. Through national pre-selections and contests together with a global jury process, WSA demonstrates the local diversity and rich creativity of ICT use. WSA is a global hub for everyone who values the crucial importance of local content to make today’s information society more inclusive. 

Visit us on www.wsis-award.org, facebook.com/WorldSummitAward and twitter.com/WSAoffice, #WSACairo

Dear Monaqasat Users,

We are very happy today to announce the release of Monaqasat.com v2.0. More than just an upgrade or a minor release, this release is a major rewrite of the MENA’s favorite eTendering engine in order to drastically improve its speed and set the base for a series of features that will once again revolutionize how tendering is done.

Here is a small overview of the hundreds of new features:

1. Brand new Design

To celebrate Monaqasat’s 3rd birthday (and the 10 billion processed bids mark), we wanted to refresh the overall layout with a more dynamic and fresh look. The new layout is cleaner, more vivid and showcases better what Monaqasat.com is all about: being the best Cloud eTendering solution for companies of all types.

2. Improved BOQ Controls

To better control how bidders fill each item within the Bill of Quantities, Monaqasat.com introduces per-item security items:

• Can a particular item be replaced by one or more other items?
• Can the item’s quantity be changed by the bidders?
• Is a particular item mandatory or optional?

A picture is worth a thousand words, or in our case, an Interactive Graph is worth a thousand Excel Sheets. One of the most time consuming aspects of the tendering process is opening bids, ensuring that the bidding was done according to specifications set forth by the tender issuer and analyzing the bids to understand the pricing structure. Monaqasat.com v2 takes the pain away and makes this process much easier thanks to its new Dynamic Reports section that automatically presents the data in interactive graphical format, allowing you to see the information any way you want it to.

4. Support for Multiple Currencies

Monaqasat.com is growing and is expanding outside of the UAE. As such, it now supports payments and tender prices in all major currencies in the MENA region, such as AED, BHD, EUR, JOD, LBP, OMR, QAR, SAR, USD and YER. We will work on adding more currencies in the coming months, so please let us know which ones you require.

5. Smart BOQ & Bid Editor

Documenters, Verifiers and Bidders know how time-consuming it can be to create, edit or fill a Bill of Quantities. To make their lives easier, we’ve completely redesigned the BoQ and Bid editors to make them as quick and efficient as possible. 

For Documenters:

• Bids are properly migrated when a new BOQ is updated, saving hours of work,
• BoQ and Bid are now automatically saved every 5 minutes,
• Much improved performance and controls,

For Bidders

• Bulk Editing of the one or more items,
• A new ‘adjustment’ column has been introduced for bidders, allowing them to quickly apply percentage or value adjustments to each element or to categories,
• Real-time highlighting of the items that have yet to be priced, allowing you to focus exactly on what is left to be done,
• Easy exporting of the Bill of Quantities document to Excel for offline studying

You are based in the UAE but you want to build a project in Qatar or in Morocco. What are the best contractors or sub-contractors to invite to your tender? That is one of the main goals of the Monaqasat.com platform and will be one of the major areas of improvement over the next releases. To get your company ready for this functionality, start building your own company profile by going into your Administration area and adding as much information about your company as possible.  

7. Support Page

Our customers have always been at the core of our business. To better support our growing customer base, we’ve migrated our support portal to a much more complete and dynamic system that can be accessed at http://support.monaqasat.com from where you will be able to read answers to known questions and problems, browse discussions or suggest new topics. Every person in the company will be actively monitoring the forums and ensuring that every query, every idea and every comment is taken into consideration. So ask away!

Today, a little bit after 3 years of being founded, Monaqasat.com has officially crossed the USD 10 billion milestone of processed bids! We are extremely honored to have been chosen by over 700 companies in the Middle East to assist them in streamlining their tendering process and look forward to the next 10 billion.

2012 will be an even bigger year for Monaqasat.com. Stayed tuned for more.

Abu Dhabi, UAE - April 16th, 2011 - Monaqasat.com, the leading online tender process management provider in the Middle East and North Africa, announced today that it had crossed US$5 billion worth of bids being processed on its website, with real estate bids accounting for the major part of the tenders being processed.

Monaqasat.com’s milestone signals a steady recovery in the Middle East’s real estate sector and highlights the growing popularity of the Internet among developers and consultants who seek to manage their projects with maximum efficiency, cost control and transparency. By allowing companies to bid and transact online, the online solution has helped to save over 4.5 million pages of paper.

“Since our establishment less than two years ago, more than 480 tenders representing a range of industry sectors have been floated on the portal and the response from bidders has been fantastic,” said Karim Helal, General Manager of Monaqasat.com. “This just goes to show that bidders in the MENA region are now looking beyond traditional means of approaching project partners and reaching out to providers in other countries too.”

Currently, over 630 companies use the Monaqasat.com e-tender platform, including important construction players such as Abu Dhabi Construction Engineering (the engineering branch of ADCB), KEO, ACG, Helal & Partners, Syrconsult, Heberger Engineering, Dar Al Omran Abu Dhabi Architectural Engineering Consultancy and Al Meedan, Al Fara’a Properties, Dhafra Intl Projects, Dhafir Development & Contracting, Group 3, Q Construction and Al Mezin General Contracting.

With this popularity, Monaqasat.com has emerged as one of the largest online B2B marketplace in the Middle East, connecting global buyers with suppliers. Using its easy-to-use interface, companies can save approximately Dhs25,000 per tender. In order to meet the growing demand for its services and to further increase its penetration in the MENA region, Monaqasat.com will open its own regional offices soon in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Lebanon. Last month, it was named winner of the Arab Golden Chip Award (AGCA) for Best Web 2.0 Solution in Damascus, Syria, recognising its outstanding contribution in the field of ICT. Monaqasat.com also came in second at the ArabNet Start-Up Competition held in Lebanon recently.

Monaqasat.com provides a complete, end-to-end solution allowing all tender participants to collaborate in one central e-Tendering platform. Once a company subscribes to the system, it can create tenders and also collaborate as documenters in other company’s tenders or bids.