Love Me Tender is a platform for government agencies and suppliers to find their perfect match. It provides a better way to access Australian government contract data listed on AusTender.
In financial year 2016/17 more than 64,000 Australian federal government contracts were awarded at a total value of more than $47 billion. To put that figure into perspective, that's 10.5% of federal budget expenditure and 2.8% of Australia's GDP. Individual contract listings are made publicly available through AusTender. Love Me Tender allows you to visualise and aggregate this data to get the bigger picture.
In other sectors of the economy, detailed transaction data is considered highly valuable commercially confidential information. In the government sector, procurement data is made freely available through AusTender but not in a readily usable form. Love Me Tender unlocks the value of this publicly available data by delivering insights relevant to particular sectors, agencies and suppliers, as well as the economy as a whole.
Love Me Tender is a versatile tool and is free to use!
Individuals use Love Me Tender to work out where their taxes are being spent. Federal government spending on private sector contracts represents an average of more than $2,000 per person per year. Love Me Tender is a powerful tool for open democracy, where citizens (and journalists on their behalf) can see what the government is up to.
Businesses who supply services to government use Love Me Tender to give them a competitive edge in winning government contracts. What's our market share? Who are our competitors? What clients and lines of work are our competitors profiting from that we should focus on in future? What are the big opportunities and which markets have we already saturated? These are the kinds of questions Love Me Tender can help answer.
Government uses Love Me Tender to analyse where they are spending their money. Are there categories of work is our agency spending too much or too little on? How does our expenditure compare to other similar agencies? Are there suppliers we could be more proactively engaging with? Love Me Tender can help provide the answers to these questions.
The data includes all federal government contracts published on AusTender since 1 July 2007. Agencies are required to publish contracts of a value of at least $10,000. The data is updated weekly on Sunday.
Search contracts by keyword or filter by specific fields such as agency, supplier and category. Easily include multiple criteria to rapidly achieve complex searches and comparisons.
Pull up an interactive chart of your results in seconds. View multiple fields on the same chart to reveal detailed insights.
View details of individual contracts in a sortable table including fields such as contract value, date, agency, supplier, category and description.
Search for contracts and receive alerts when new contracts meeting your criteria are published. The emails provide you with the latest reports on the data and can be sent weekly, fortnightly, monthly or quarterly. Sign up for multiple reports and you'll receive them in a single digest. You can also sign up for our general emails if you want to keep up to date with information from Love Me Tender.
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Some explanatory notes are in order to help you get the most out of Love Me Tender.
Data from 1 July 2007 to 3 January 2018 is obtained from data.gov.au. Data from 4 January 2018 onwards is obtained from the weekly export provided on AusTender. Data will continue to be updated as more contracts are released through data.gov.au. The data is provided through AusTender, and as such may contain inaccuracies. As in all industry analysis, findings from this data should be treated as indicative with the appropriate caveats about the quality of the source data. Beyond these inherent limitations, if you notice data on specific contracts that is inaccurate, missing or duplicate, please get in touch.
Contracts are sometimes amended after their initial publication. The approach taken by Love Me Tender is to include only the most up-to-date versions of these amended contracts to avoid double-counting. However, if you wish to view previous versions you may select that option within the table view.
AusTender data includes a free text field for supplier name, meaning that the same supplier may be referred to using multiple names. Fortunately, the Australian Business Number (ABN) is also listed, which provides a more stable identifier of individual suppliers. Love Me Tender uses ABN, not the free text field, to identify the supplier. The supplier name is determined by finding the most frequently occurring supplier name for that ABN across the entire dataset.
AusTender uses the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code to classify contracts. Love Me Tender allows you to search by these categories. The categories are based on an eight-digit coding system, where each pair of digits adds an increased level of specificity. 'Broad categories' refer to the first two digits of the code, making up just over 50 categories. 'Specific categories' refer to all eight digits of the code, with the AusTender data including over 2000 of these categories.
AusTender data includes a publish date, start date and end date for each contract. Love Me Tender suggests using publish date for analysis over time as it represents a 'point in time' to attribute a particular contract. Revenue earnt from the contract may not flow until the period between the start date and the end date. All of these dates are viewable in the table view of contracts.
Department of Finance rules specify three methods, which in decreasing order of competitiveness are open tender, prequalified tender and limited tender. Open tender involves a broad approach to the market. Limited tender involves a direct approach to one or more suppliers. Prequalified tender sits in the middle, with an initial 'prequalification' round followed by a tendering process with a shortlist of suppliers.
AusTender data also includes some other fields such as the Standing Offer Notice Identification (SON ID), the Approach to Market Identification (ATM ID), the supplier's address and the agency's contact details. While Love Me Tender includes only the most frequently useful fields in its user interface, by downloading the table data to CSV you can explore all fields from AusTender.
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Love Me Tender is an open democracy project delivering public value from government data. Its initial prototype was developed at GovHack 2013, where it received an honourable mention in the 'Best contribution to open data' category. It was then presented at the ACT Innovation Showcase 2013. Following further development of its functionality, it was made publicly available in 2015.
The creator of Love Me Tender is Daniel McNamara. Daniel has worked in management consulting at Nous Group, at the data analytics crowdsourcing platform Kaggle and as a data specialist for the Australian Labor Party. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Australian National University.
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