Cobrief uses information about your company to know which bids you should see. The first time you register an account in Cobrief, you therefore choose which company to register, and Cobrief will make suggestions as to what we should show you. We call these service areas, and they are a collection of procurement codes (CPV codes) that we know many procurers use within your service.
Keep track of bid opportunities
After registration, the company will get its very own inbox, where Cobrief summarizes and collects all relevant bids for you. When you find a relevant bid, you can save it for assessment by clicking "Save".
If you click on hide, the bid will be removed from the inbox, but you can always retrieve the bid by clicking on the three dots to the top right of the "In preparation" tab.
When the inbox is empty, you can click on the "To be assessed" tab to see all bids for assessment.
At the top right of the card, you will find the relevance score for the bid. This is a score that says how good a match the bid is compared to the company's bid search.
Get notified about new competitions
Get information about new bids as soon as they are announced by setting up bid notifications. By default, the person who registered in Cobrief receives bid notifications by e-mail once every weekday. You can adjust this by clicking on "Notifications" in the company menu.
To add more e-mails to the notifications, you can create a new notification.
Click "Create new notification".
Then select the channel you want to be notified in (2). If you have Slack, Cobrief can send a message to a shared Slack channel.
Choose who should receive the e-mail notification if you have chosen e-mail as the channel.
Choose when you want to be notified. All notifications are sent out at 7 in the morning, except for real-time notifications which are sent when the competition is announced on Doffin.
See how you can invite your coworker
When you have created a new notification, you can delete the old one to avoid being notified twice.
Customize the filtering
If you want full control over your bid search, you can click on the company name and select "Filtering".
From here you can customize the following filters:
CPV-codes - When procurers announce new bids, they choose from a set of over 10,000 standardized CPV codes. Here you can choose which codes Cobrief should show you bids for.
Keywords - When a notice contains one of the keywords you have selected in its description or title, Cobrief will show you the bid.
Procurers - Select specific procurers you want to receive or not receive notifications for.
Bid phases - Choose whether you also want to be notified about planning phases, so that you can prepare for important future bid competitions.
Relevance score - All the filters from 1-4 will affect the relevance score the bid receives, both their specificity and the number of matches. With this filter you can only be notified about bids that have a certain score.
The two most important filters are CPV-codes (1) and keywords (2).
CPV-codes
From CPV-codes you can search for specific codes, and the matches will be highlighted. CPV-codes are built up in a tree structure, where the number of letters in the code says how specific the code is. In general, the codes at the top of the tree will give the most hits and thus also the most noise.
When you select CPV-codes, Cobrief will suggest other codes that are often used by procurers together with the code you selected. This is a good way to find new relevant codes for your company.
At the bottom next to the save button, you can see the number of hits your search will give, which is often a good indication of whether your search is too narrow or too broad. It is recommended to have between 5 and 20 hits a week, depending on how large an area you deliver to.
Tip: Look at the change in the number of weekly hits when you select a code to avoid overly broad CPV-Codes.
Keywords
The notices do not always have the most correct CPV-Codes, and it is therefore useful to use keywords to ensure that you are still notified about the bids. In addition, the keywords will have a positive effect on the relevance score, which is very useful if you use a filter on relevance score as well.
You will find the keywords by clicking on "Keywords" in the menu on the left.
From here, Cobrief suggests relevant keywords based on the CPV-Codes you have chosen, but you can also enter your own keywords by typing in the text field and pressing "Add".
It is recommended to choose keywords that are industry-specific, so that you avoid notifications across all industries.
Examples of good codes in this example are "marketing", "graphic design", "visual identity" and "typography", while bad examples could be "management", "consultation" and "advisory".
Optimize the bid search over time
It is difficult to get a perfect bid search from the start, so this is something you can do continuously the first time you use Cobrief. We recommend doing this via the relevance scores.
If you see a bid that is not relevant, click on the relevance score at the top right of the card and remove the code that matched the bid. From there you can see all the competitions that will be removed from your search by removing that code.
This also applies to bids that are relevant but have a low score. Then you can click on the relevance score to see which codes the procurer has chosen that you do not have in your search, and add them by pressing the plus button.
Cobrief will also suggest codes you can remove as you hide bids, so that you can easily remove noise when you empty your inbox.
