Suitability vs. Award Criteria: Why SMEs Lose Public IT Tenders Before Price Even Matters

The best bid is worthless if it never gets evaluated. In public IT tenders, many SMEs are knocked out before price even comes into play.Public contracts are seen as attractive: predictable volumes, reliable clients, and long-term perspectives. Yet many small- and mid-sized IT providers never approach tenders—or fail without quite understanding why. Usually it comes down to a misunderstanding about the two assessment stages in every award.

Created by Oleksandra Razek

Two gates, not one.

Suitability criteria answer the question: is this company even allowed to bid? They test things like references, turnover, technical capability, certifications, staffing capacity and reliability. This stage is a yes/no filter. Fail it, and you're out—no matter how good or cheap your offer is.

Award criteria answer a different question: which of the admitted bids wins? Only here do price, quality, concept, and delivery plan count. And this is the decisive point: price is only assessed once suitability is already established.

The uncomfortable consequence: an SME can submit the most economical and technically best offer—and still never be evaluated, because it lacks a required reference or minimum capacity at the suitability stage.

Where SMEs typically fail.

  • Missing or too-small reference projects of comparable size

  • Insufficient staffing capacity to demonstrably deliver the required service

  • Required certifications or minimum turnover a single small company can't meet alone

These are rarely quality problems. They are proof-able problems. And procurement law provides explicit solutions for proof problems.

How smaller providers still get in.

Procurement law—in Austria, the Federal Procurement Act (BVergG)—explicitly allows suitability to be demonstrated jointly. The main routes:

  • Bidding consortium (ARGE): Several companies bid together and pool references and capacity.

  • Subcontracting and reliance on third-party capacity: a bidder relies on a partner's capacity to meet minimum requirements.

  • Buying in capacity deliberately:certified specialists covering the required profile are brought in via a partner.

This is exactly where we come in. Suppliance brings the IT specialists and project capacity that help smaller providers pass the suitability stage – so their bid makes it into the evaluation at all. Price doesn't decide whether you get to play. Suitability does.

→ Want to bid on public IT tenders but lack the suitability? Become a partner—we bid together.

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