Prioritising tendering activities for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)

The tendering process involves high costs, in terms of time and effort and therefore it is not desirable or sustainable to tender for projects unless the chances of winning are good. Small to medium sized companies do not have enough human resources to enable staff to be dedicated to the job of tending and monitoring market opportunities, and hence company officials have to fit in this job around their usual duties. This paper proposes a knowledge discovery and mining approach to assist the tender offer selection process. Knowledge discovery and mining assures identification and matching of the areas of interest and other criteria of selection of the tender offers, while multi–criteria decision making supports the consideration of other relevant factors for selection.