Euroalert.net gets ready for the changes in the new TED website

As you all know Euroalert.net publishes and distributes a set of different information products related to public procurement announcements from European Union countries which are published in the OJEU. This means that we follow closely any change made by the Office of Publications of the European Union regarding the structure and characteristics of the publication of these public procurement notices.


A few changes, which can probably be considered as some of the most relevant ones affecting public tendering information and publication in recent times, will take place in the coming days: the new TED website will be available from March 16th, changing its interface and some of its functionalities. As we all know big changes sometimes cause some inconveniences to users, as it will be the case with the loss of saved search profiles for TED users, which will have to be saved and redefined in the new system once the new TED site is launched.

Since the announcement of the migration a couple of months ago, we started working to ensure that as far as possible any of Euroalert.net users and subscribers will be affected by the changes to be introduced in TED website. This changes will restructure essential elements such as NUTS codes and some other characteristics for filtering announcement and notices.

One of the key values of the services provided by Euroalert.net is being able to prepare ourselves and ensure a completely transparent transition for our customers so that the system remains up and running and their functionalities are still the same from the very first day on all our services: 10ders observatory, with data mining services on information from public markets, Euroalert widgets for the automatic publication of procurement notices in the web of our subscribers and web services for content delivery.

Since we started offering business opportunities in the EU public procurement market within the Euroalert.net website there has already been some relevant changes in TED structure which have been immediately assimilated by Euroalert.net, always ensuring the best service for our customers and subscribers. Not so long ago, this was the case for the update of cpv codes in 2008. One of our main commitments is to be prepared to offer to those who rely on Euroalert.net the best possible service.

We will continue keeping you up to the date with these changes and making sure that Euroalert.net always provides you with the best information services on EU public procurement in the most reliable way and at very cost-effective prices thanks to our innovative search technology.

One more step towards an ever closer Union on public procurement..., and more filters available for Euroalert.net

By the end of last year, and more precisely on December 20th 2009, the transposition period given to Member States to adapt their national legislations to Directive 2007/66/EC (the so called Remedies Directive), ended up, being that at the beginning of 2010 only France, Poland, Slovakia and the United Kingdom had fulfilled their obligation and notified the Commission about the measures taken to do so. Given that only three more MS had notified partial transposition measures, it leaves twenty MS which had failed to notify the Commission about transposition measures concerning Directive 2007/66/EC by the beginning of 2010.

Looking back, it was in May 2006 when the Commission put forward a proposal to amend the Remedies Directive aimed to ensure a more equitable environment in public procurement and encourage EU companies to tender in any MS by providing them higher legal certainty. This review based on previous consultations, was intended to improve the effectiveness of pre-contractual reviews as well as providing a way to fight against situations where redress measures were not sufficiently clear for unsuccessful bidders or even situations of “race to the signature” in which there is not a reasonable period between the award of the contract and its signature.

One of the key elements of this revision on Remedies Directives has been the introduction of a harmonized 10-day Mandatory Standstill Period between the award of the contract and its signature, in order to allow unsuccessful bidders to request additional information and take appropriate actions if they consider that their right has been harmed by breach of the rules. If the standstill period is not respected or the contract has been illegally awarded, the Directive provides the possibility to bring it to the Court and declare the ineffectiveness of the contract. The ineffectiveness of the contract can be declared on various grounds such as the failure to advertise the contract in the OJEU or the breach of the standstill period and the automatic suspension, and can be claimed up to six months after the contract award.

Apart from any dogmatic issues which have already come to the Palestra, it seems that contracting authorities, economic operators and national Courts will now have to face the legal consequences of declaring a contract's ineffectiveness, the compensations, as well as the eventual practical issues arising from that declaration such as protection of properties, subcontractors rights protection or any other situation originated. It seems, indeed, quite an interesting debate...

The new Remedies Directive targets very specially the illegal direct award of contracts, which has been considered by the European Court of Justice as the most serious breach of Community law in the field of public procurement on the part of a contracting authority, giving the Courts the possibility to declare ineffective a contract directly awarded if transparency and open competitiveness has not been respected.

Further to these redress measures, Directive 2007/66/EC also introduces some new practical issues such as the introduction of a new form, the so-called Voluntary Ex Ante Transparency (VEAT) notice, which allows contracting authorities to avoid ineffectiveness of the contract based on failure to advertise by giving the required transparency. This type of document will generally be associated to the award procedure of a contract without prior publication of a contract notice or the negotiated without a call for competition procedure.

In addition to improving access to information concerning Community public procurement, the implementation of Directive 2007/66/EC will also have some practical implications, providing new filtering options for the information tools which allow Euroalert.net users to publish EU procurement notices in any website, allowing them to publish these type of notices automatically in their sites.

We have already mentioned in several occasions the difficulties that many EU companies face when taking part in public procurement market. These barriers to access public procurement market, which are even being considered under the scope of the new European Innovation Plan, burden very specially small but very innovative companies, as it is considered that promoting innovation by public procurement could be a good contribution to rationalize public expenses. This is one of the reasons why Euroalert.net keeps its commitment to continue to facilitate access to information about public procurement opportunities in the European Union for all interested public.

We will keep you posted on any new feature which comes up to improve Euroalert.net tools, as well as any new possibility that new developments on EU public procurement rules may offer for all of you.

New Tender's CPV codes already in Euroalert.net

Those of you who are already subscribers of the Euroalert.net weekly Newsletter, will be aware of the changes that the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities has made on the CPV codes which describe the content of contracts in public procurement. For those who haven't subscribed to the Newsletter yet, here are some tips.

Every day, the OJEU publishes in the S Series, more than one thousand calls for tenders for works, services or supplies contracts in public procurement: the same you can find every morning in Euroalert.net Calls for Tenders section.

In order to allow economic operators to have free and easy access to these contracts, CPV codes (whose 2008 version has been adopted September 17th), provide a unique classification vocabulary. This system is made up of a main vocabulary of eight digits which give a detailed description of the product or service the contract is related to, followed by a check digit which verifies the code. The more you go down in this tree structure, the more accurate the description is. Simple, isn't it?

There is also a supplementary vocabulary which, although it is not always used, helps to complete even more the description giving some additional details for one specific call. This is the short version of the full description of the new CPV codes for Public Procurement Announcements which we provide you in Euroalert.net. In this section you will also find some documents you can download, which will certainly be useful.

In essence, this coding system aims to provide the highest transparency and accessibility to information, contributing to the fulfilment of the Four Freedoms within the EU Single Market.

In fact, Euroalert.net widgets also provides some tools which can help to improve access to calls for tenders and commercial opportunities in public procurement within the EU, as it allows not only to automatically display them in any website, intranet or blog, but also to filter the results and display only those which really meet the needs of the subscribers. In order to make you as easy as possible to access EU contents, in Euroalert.net we have introduced those changes over the CPV codes from the very first day, adapting the publication and filters to these news.

In future posts we will be spending some time explaining how you can get the most from Euroalert.net Calls for Tenders widgets in public procurement, using the CPV codes, as well as some other features.