Frequently asked questions

BIDI is a complete solution: an AI-assisted tendering system that covers every stage of a competitive procurement. In BIDI you describe the need, prepare the procurement in full (including a request for information or other market survey) and run the tendering process from end to end.

BIDI is eForms-compatible. You can publish the call for tenders to Hilma and TED, receive tenders, compare them, and produce the award decision and the contract. BIDI drafts the procurement report and other records automatically.

BIDI was built by procurement lawyers and procurement specialists working together. The professionals on the development team bring decades of substantive procurement knowledge and hands-on experience of procurements across many sectors, and of the problems typical to each.

That expertise reaches the customer already built into the system: it is why the flow of the process, the tools and the AI work differently here. You can run a procurement backed by that expertise without stretching your own procurement resources thin.

No. BIDI replaces the tendering system rather than sitting beside one. It is a SaaS service with a very low barrier to adoption: it runs in a web browser, with no separate onboarding or integration project.

Yes. BIDI includes a tenderer portal where suppliers register. Tenders are submitted in BIDI and handled in BIDI.

The tenderer side also carries genuinely new features that make preparing and submitting a tender easier.

In BIDI you can either draft the contract or import a procurement contract made in another system. The contract stage can also be skipped altogether if contract management happens in a tool outside BIDI. Further tools and features for managing the contract period are on the way.

BIDI uses commercial language models, accessed through the model provider's API. BIDI does not train models of its own, and customer material is not used to train models.

What is trained into BIDI is the procurement expertise. Around the model sit the best practices of procurement professionals: the staging of the process, the question sets, the document templates, the checklists and the constraints of the Procurement Act. The AI does not work out how to run a tender on its own; it follows the way procurement lawyers and specialists have defined.

In practice the AI acts as a procurement assistant. It drafts proposals for the description of the procurement, the requirements and the comparison criteria, structures and summarises the material uploaded during preparation, checks documents for internal consistency and gaps, and assists in handling tenders. We always say where in the process AI is used and what its proposals are based on.

The AI makes no award decisions and approves no documents on its own. Every proposal can be reviewed and edited by a professional, and a person always makes the decision.

Yes. BIDI offers several new tools and ways of conducting market dialogue.

Everything produced during a tender stays together in BIDI, because the dialogue with internal experts and with the market can be run interactively in BIDI itself. Separate email threads and parallel file versions are no longer needed the way they used to be.

BIDI also draws on the material uploaded during preparation — an earlier call for tenders, spend data, other documents — when the actual call for tenders is drafted. Everything stays in one place, and the system takes care of putting it to use in the later stages of the process.

Procurement material contains trade secrets, and before the tender deadline it contains tender information that nobody may see early. Security is therefore a starting point in BIDI's design rather than a feature bolted on afterwards.

Access control is role-based: each person sees only what they have been granted. Experts and tenderers outside the organisation are invited to comment through a scoped invitation link that opens only the view the procurement owner has defined. Everyone invited identifies themselves before that view opens, either with a one-time code sent to their email or, as a representative of their organisation, with their own credentials.

Every action is written to a traceable log. The whole tender, from identifying the need to the award decision, is documented and verifiable after the fact. The same traceability that makes a procurement defensible in a review also serves information security.

Personal data is processed only to the extent the procurement procedure requires, in accordance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation, and a data processing agreement (DPA) template is available on request. Customer data can be exported throughout the contract, and it is handed over when the contract ends.

Pilots with customers are already under way, so you can ask for a conversation and a quote right now. We are taking on new pilot customers at the moment and are glad to hear more about what you need from a procurement system.

Pilots are run by experienced procurement lawyers and consultants, so that as little of the customer's own resource as possible is tied up. The customer follows the pilot, comments on the system and assesses what it is worth in their own procurement work.

BIDI will carry every procurement procedure that procurement legislation recognises. In the pilot you can currently run a procurement under the open procedure (national or EU) and as a small procurement. The other procedure types are being introduced in stages over the coming months.

Yes. BIDI handles EU and national procurements as well as small procurements. It has a separate small-procurement portal for tenders below the thresholds, with tools and features of its own that make small procurements easier to run.

BIDI supports interactive collaboration with substantive experts and with tenderers. Bringing other stakeholders into the preparation is straightforward: you decide yourself what view of the procurement under preparation each of them is given.

The experts or tenderers you choose comment in BIDI in real time through an invitation link. Whoever is invited signs in with a one-time code sent to their email, or as a representative of their organisation with their own credentials, so nothing has to be set up in advance. You can also track who has responded to a request for comments and send automatic reminders.

You can still use separate documents when preparing a procurement and drafting the call for tenders, exactly as before. BIDI is built so that no stage of preparation requires the user to produce a document outside the system.

The tender form can be drafted in a spreadsheet-equivalent format with BIDI's procurement assistant, and reference forms, for instance, live inside the system in their usual shape. If you prefer, the call-for-tenders material can also be downloaded in Word format, whether because commenting is easier that way for other experts or because the interactive way of working is not the one you want.