The U.S. Federal Government is the largest buyer in the world, and state and local governments often make up a large percentage of their respective marketplaces.

a certain percentage of everything the government buys. And despite budget crunches in many municipalities, state and local government spending remains the largest in any single market in the nation. Budget pressures on the state and local level, and even in many Federal areas, also mean more interest in saving money on parts, systems, and services related to critical IT infrastructure. For a company looking at bid opportunities, deciding whether to bid on a government contract can have farreaching and long-term implications. It is crucial to reach the right decision - a decision which contributes to the health of an organization. If a company decides to bid, it is creating an opportunity to make money, enhance its reputation, gain experience and cement a relationship

Where do vendors start?

with a major new customer. There are literally tens of thousands of purchasing agencies to deal with, making it difficult to know where to begin. Unfortunately, bidding for lucrative government contracts is a highly decentralized process. Companies used to have to be on an agency's bidding list in order to be notified of a purchasing opportunity. Now, with the expansion of electronic government and recent government initiatives encouraging agencies to implement online procurement systems, many agencies are making the move to e-procurement. However, even with this move to online purchasing, identifying targeted bids can still be very challenging for companies. Finding and monitoring bid notices is difficult because they are posted in so many different places and often not well organized. Your business can spend a great deal of time surfing from one site to the next trying to track down the right bid opportunities. In one area of government bidding, however, an effort to create a governmentwide point of entry web site has resulted in an Internet purchasing marketplace called FedBizOpps. As of 2001, the Federal government requires federal agencies to use this system to post all their opportunities expected to exceed $25,000. Although no such central web site exists for the over 87,000 state and local government agencies in the country, there are services available services such as BidNet (www.bidnet. com) that match a company's criteria with agency bids from a variety of sources, including the Internet, then send this information directly to those companies via email. To accurately consider the opportunities that exist for your specific business, BidNet.com offers a free Market Analysis, which gives details of the number and types of recent opportunities that meet your business needs. Their free consultation will cover where the opportunities are located, both geographically and in terms of government level, as well as how to most effectively get started. While no service can provide your company with every bid opportunity from every state and local government agency, bid matching services greatly reduce a vendor's time and money spent, allowing for additional time to be used to respond to just the "right? bids. |PSO| June 2008 | PowerSourceOnline.com 41

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