Let’s face it –pharmaceutical tendering isn’t just another sales channel – it’s becoming a significant revenue stream. With over 30% of global pharmaceutical products being tendered (and projected to grow), mastering tender management isn’t optional – it’s crucial for growth.
Tendering has evolved beyond its traditional stronghold in established products and generics. We’re seeing growth in biosimilar tenders, blood-plasma products, and even innovative on-patent medications.
Yet, with great opportunity comes a unique set of challenges: Intricate regulations, complex requirements or ever-evolving market dynamics can pose significant hurdles, whether you are a tender management trainee or a seasoned professional!
Let’s dive into the 5 most critical challenges in tender management and explore practical solutions that can transform your tendering business from chaotic to organized!
Let us first clarify that success in pharmaceutical tender management isn’t about avoiding challenges – it’s about having the right systems and strategies to overcome them. Start by assessing where you are on the maturity curve for each challenge area and create a roadmap for improvement.
Challenge 1: “It’s exhausting constantly searching for global tender opportunities in a fragmented market.”
The pharmaceutical tender landscape is almost like universe – opportunities are plenty, but visibility is often poor. Many organizations struggle with fragmented market intelligence, missing crucial opportunities, or worse – discovering them too late for meaningful action.
Two significant challenges arise at this stage, even before the actual tender management process begins. Firstly, the manual effort involved in gathering scattered information from diverse online tender sources is considerable. Collecting and organizing data manually is time-consuming and prone to errors. Secondly, navigating the complex and often inconsistent structures of bidding platforms & websites delays efficient tender discovery and increases the risk of missing critical opportunities.
Challenge 2: “It takes me too long to decide if a tender is even worth pursuing.”
As a tender manager staring at a stack of potential opportunities, one question constantly arises: “Which tenders should we actually pursue?” Without clear prioritization criteria, deciding where to focus your limited resources becomes a real headache.
The challenge starts with initial qualification – the need to quickly understand if you can deliver on the tender requirements and if it makes business sense. Another challenge is you need to assess the impact on the supply chain and other operations.
Making matters worse, very often systems do not…talk to each other! Moving data between a CRM and tender documents is a manual task that eats up valuable time. All this administrative work means less time for strategic thinking about which opportunities really matter and submitting bids without knowing if they’re the right ones to pursue in the first place.
Challenge 3: “Every bid feels like a high-stakes game – trying to outmaneuver our competitors’ price without jeopardizing our own profitability”
Let’s be real, pricing in Life Sciences public tenders has always been a headache. Constantly struggling with limited tender price transparency, trying to figure out the sweet spot for the bid price and never really knowing what competitors are thinking, since there’s limited information on their pricing strategies. It’s such a critical factor, and yet pricing teams are often left in the dark.
Challenge 4: “We’re drowning in emails, and it’s impossible to keep track of who’s doing what.”
Accountability? What’s this? Deadlines are missed, responsibilities get shuffled around, and it’s impossible to pinpoint who is responsible for the delays. Coordinating internally with the team is a long thread of emails and all critical documents are scattered across shared drives & individual PCs. Another critical challenge is the internal approval process, waiting for sign-offs, which is seriously impacting a team’s ability to submit bids on time.
Challenge 5: “Why are we not learning from our tender wins and losses?”
After a tender is submitted, valuable insights often go untapped. Limited competitor intelligence makes it difficult to understand their strategies and pricing. Additionally, changes in award criteria may go unnoticed, impacting future bid preparation. A lack of knowledge about the specific needs and preferences of buyers and tender authorities can significantly disadvantage companies. Furthermore, crucial information such as winning bids and awarded prices is often unavailable, making it difficult to analyze past performance. Without tracking company performance across won and lost tenders, companies miss out on valuable lessons and opportunities for continuous improvement.
Success in tendering starts with a centralized system that combines:
- Advanced Tender Discovery & Qualification: Automatically identify relevant opportunities globally, based on keywords, budget, and strategic criteria. Proactively target future opportunities by planning ahead with anticipated tender lots.
- Competitive intelligence: Estimate win probability, analyze competitor pricing, and access net pricing insights to optimize your bids.
- Streamlined workflows: Improve internal collaboration and efficiency with automated workflows and shared team notes.
- Outcome tracking: Analyze historical data, including wins, losses, and competitor performance, to identify areas for improvement and gain valuable insights into buyer preferences.
Want to transform your tender management approach?
Tender Central is your all-in-one, AI-driven tender management & collaboration platform, pre-loaded with relevant market data and intelligence for your specific portfolio.
Streamline your tendering process, with effortless access to a curated database of insights and tools – all in one place!
11/02/2025 
