Straža Nabavki: intelligent monitoring of public procurement in Serbia

Taking part in public procurement opens up additional opportunities for companies to grow the business and win new customers. Searching for suitable tenders on your own, however, takes a significant amount of time: staff have to check the public procurement portal regularly, read new notices and judge how well they match the company's profile.

The Straža Nabavki service automates this process. It continuously tracks the procurements published on the official Public Procurement Portal of the Republic of Serbia, analyses them with artificial intelligence and sends users selections of the most suitable opportunities.

Finding tenders without complicated setup

The main feature of Straža Nabavki is how simple the monitoring is to set up.

The user does not have to choose classification codes, compose complex search queries or configure numerous filters. It is enough to describe in plain words what the company does, the goods and services it offers, where it works and which areas interest it.

This is about CPV codes — the single classification of procurement subjects that buyers use to describe what exactly they are purchasing. Normally a supplier has to work through it alone: the service publishes the full CPV classifier in Serbian, with search — 9 454 main vocabulary codes across 45 divisions.

For example:

The company designs, builds and reconstructs roads, bridges and municipal infrastructure across Serbia.

From this description the system builds a profile of what the company does. The artificial intelligence takes into account not only individual words but the overall meaning of the text, which lets it find potentially interesting procurements even where a notice uses different wording.

Analysis of published procurements

Once the profile is created, the service analyses the body of tenders published over the last 30 days. This lets the user see straight away how many public procurements match what the company does, and what is in them.

From then on Straža Nabavki continuously tracks new notices on the official portal. Every published tender is automatically matched against the user's profile.

The official portal is jnportal.ujn.gov.rs: every procedure is published there and bids are submitted there too. How a company registers on it, how a procedure differs from a lot and how to read a tender card is explained in the guide to the procurement portal for suppliers.

If a procurement matches what the company does and may be of commercial interest, it goes into the personal selection.

Two reports a day

Selections of suitable tenders are sent to the user by email twice a day. That keeps them informed about new opportunities in good time, without constantly checking the portal themselves.

Every notification contains the key details of the procurement:

• the name and subject of the tender;
• details of the buyer;
• the estimated value;
• the bid submission deadline;
• a link to the notice;
• a direct link to the tender documentation.

The user receives only potentially suitable opportunities and can go straight on to studying the terms of the procurement in detail.

Two emails a day is not excess but a consequence of the deadlines: the median submission period in Serbian procurement is 12.5 days from publication, and 41% of lots give 12 days or less. A missed week often means a missed tender; how the deadlines are counted and what happens when the documentation changes is covered in a separate guide.

What is innovative about the service

Traditional tender monitoring systems are usually based on keywords, classification codes and pre-set filters. To work effectively with such tools, the user has to understand the structure of the procurement portal well and adjust the search parameters regularly.

Straža Nabavki takes a different approach. The main control is an ordinary text description of what the company does. The artificial intelligence turns it into a meaningful profile and matches it against the information in tender notices.

This approach brings several advantages:

• no special knowledge is needed to get started;
• setting up the monitoring takes a few minutes;
• the system takes the substance of a procurement into account, not just a match on individual words;
• the chance of missing a potentially suitable tender goes down;
• the company's staff spend less time on the initial search;
• the description of the business can be changed as the business develops.

Artificial intelligence is therefore used not as an extra feature but as the foundation of the whole matching system.

Practical value for a business

Monitoring public procurement regularly on your own means assigning staff and a considerable amount of working time. On top of that there is the risk of spotting a suitable notice too late or missing it altogether.

Straža Nabavki takes on the initial search and selection of tenders. The company's specialists can concentrate on assessing the requirements, preparing documents and putting together a competitive bid.

The service is especially useful for small and medium-sized businesses that are interested in public contracts but do not have a dedicated team for constant procurement monitoring.

The scale of the market is considerable: over the last twelve months around 12 400 lots worth roughly 199 billion dinars were published on the portal, and 2 135 different buyers were purchasing — from ministries to village schools. Who buys through procurement in Serbia and how much, with the figures for the year, is covered in the market overview guide.

What was built

From the outside the service looks like an email digest, but behind it are several independent parts. A Python backend parses the Public Procurement Portal and stores the procedures in a database of its own — the only way to search by meaning rather than through the portal's search form. A language model turns the company description into a set of CPV codes, and a single company usually ends up with several dozen: a road builder falls under road works, bridge works and municipal infrastructure alike. After that come the matching of new procurements against the profile, the mailing, the user account and payment.

A separate part of the work is the public site on Next.js: 373 pages, most of them assembled from the service's own API and refreshed every hour. Live tenders by category, buyer pages, the CPV classifier and the guides are both a shop window and free value for those who are not yet ready to pay for monitoring.

Where it goes next

Straža Nabavki makes Serbia's public procurement market more accessible to business. The service removes the need for complicated initial setup and turns the daily search for tenders into an automated process.

Since the spring the service has grown beyond sending selections. A second service appeared — tracking a chosen tender: the system follows a particular procurement and reports exactly what has changed — “the deadline has moved from 4 to 11 September”, “file changed: Technical specification.pdf”, “a request for protection of rights has been filed”. For a supplier that is the difference between a bid submitted and a bid missed.

The second part of that growth is the public sections, open without registration. Open tenders by category are grouped into 41 areas and refreshed every hour, and the pages of buyers show what a particular institution buys, under which codes and which procedures it has open right now — 278 buyers with ten or more procedures over the year. The same place holds the complete CPV classifier and guides for suppliers without the legal jargon.

Payment is live: the basic plan is 5 000 dinars a month, the extended plan with notification within fifteen minutes of publication is 7 000, and tracking up to thirty procurements is 3 000 dinars. The matching can be tried free of charge and without registration.

Useful material from Straža Nabavki

• Guide to the jnportal portal — registration, search, documentation.
• The CPV classifier in Serbian — all 9 454 codes, with search.
• Serbia's open tenders by category — refreshed every hour.
• Buyers — who buys what through public procurement.
• Low-value procurement — the thresholds in the law and what follows from them.

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