BidScout Now Covers 4 Procurement Systems Across Central Europe

When we launched, BidScout watched one source: TED, the EU-wide procurement database. Then we added Hungary’s EKR. Now we’ve connected two more — the Czech Republic’s VVZ and Poland’s BZP. Four procurement systems, three national languages, one dashboard.

If you’ve been following along, you might remember the EKR post where we talked about the procurement iceberg — how most public contracts never reach TED because they sit below EU thresholds. The same logic applies here, just multiplied across two more countries.

The coverage so far

Three national portals, plus TED covering everything above EU thresholds across all 27 member states. Every title auto-translated to English, duplicates removed between sources. Austria and Germany are next on the list.

Why national portals matter

We wrote about this in detail when we added Hungary’s EKR, so the short version: TED only publishes contracts above EU procurement thresholds (€140K–€5.4M depending on the type). Everything below that threshold stays on the national portal and never reaches TED.

For countries like Czech Republic and Poland, that means the majority of public contracts are national-only. A €90,000 IT contract for a Czech hospital. A €60,000 consulting engagement for a Polish municipality. These are real opportunities with less competition than the big TED tenders, and until now they were only visible if you spoke the language and knew where to look.

Czech Republic: VVZ

VVZ stands for Věstník veřejných zakázek — the Public Procurement Bulletin. It’s part of the Czech NIPEZ procurement infrastructure and publishes every public tender in the country.

We’re pulling around 68 tenders per day from VVZ. Roughly 80% of them are below EU thresholds, meaning they’re invisible on TED. Services, supplies, construction — the usual spread you’d expect from a country of 10 million people with active public spending.

One quirk worth mentioning: the VVZ API doesn’t return contract type in its search results. It sounds like a small thing, but it matters for filtering. We work around it by running three parallel queries — one for services, one for supplies, one for construction works — and tagging each tender with the type based on which query returned it. A bit more work on our side, same clean result on yours.

All Czech titles get translated to English automatically before they enter the matching pipeline. So when VVZ publishes a tender called “Modernizace informačního systému”, it shows up in your dashboard as “Information system modernization” with the original Czech title preserved if you want it.

Poland: BZP

BZP — Biuletyn Zamówień Publicznych — runs on Poland’s e-Zamówienia platform. And it’s big.

Around 178 tenders per day. That makes it our highest-volume national source by a wide margin. Poland is the sixth-largest economy in the EU with an enormous public sector, and the procurement activity reflects that. Infrastructure, healthcare, education, IT — there’s a lot of buying happening.

The BZP integration was the most straightforward of the three national portals. Clean search API, reasonable pagination, consistent data structure. Not every government system is this cooperative, so we appreciate it when one is.

Same as Czech Republic: Polish titles get translated to English before matching. A tender for “Usługi doradztwa informatycznego” becomes “IT consulting services” in your feed. The original stays accessible on the detail page.

How it all fits together

The practical question is: what does this mean when you log in?

You still describe your company once. Behind the scenes, four separate pipelines run twice a day — TED, EKR, VVZ, BZP — each pulling fresh tenders from their respective source. Every tender gets normalized into a common format, translated to English if needed, embedded for AI matching, and scored against your profile.

Deduplication happens automatically. If a Czech tender is big enough to appear on both VVZ and TED, you’ll only see it once. Same for Polish and Hungarian tenders. No double-counting, no clutter.

On the dashboard, you can filter by source if you want to focus on a specific country. Or ignore the source filter entirely and just browse by match score — which is what most people do. The point is that the complexity happens on our side, not yours.

What’s next

Update: Austria, Germany, and Finland are now live. Read the update →

Every national portal we connect adds a layer of opportunities that was previously locked behind a language barrier and a government website most people have never heard of. That’s the gap we’re filling.

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BidScout now monitors TED (27 EU member states), EKR (Hungary), VVZ (Czech Republic), BZP (Poland), USP (Austria), DOE (Germany), and Hilma (Finland). Create your free account — takes two minutes.