Staying on Top of Procurement News

Checking up on your industry news should be a regular part of your week. You’re probably already receiving news on a regular basis from publications that focus on your industry, but are you staying on top of general procurement articles? If you think that general procurement news is not as relevant to you because the topics are too broad, you could be missing some valuable insight that can apply to any type of business – such as how agencies come to decide on particular vendors, how vendors approach the agency, and more. I’ll introduce you to a couple of different ways that you can effortlessly stay on top of procurement news.

Online Procurement Article Alerts

One way that I stay on top of procurement news is through Google alerts. You can be alerted to articles on topics of choice like “low bidder”, “contract award”, “city of XYZ”, etc. It’s also a simple way to stay on top of your competitors and news exposure.

Here’s how you can get things set up with Google alerts:

Go to www.google.com/alerts. The set up is simple: type in your search terms, email address, how often you want the information mailed to you, and the resources you would like to utilize (web, blogs, news, groups).

Every day, you’ll get an HTML listing of articles that you can skim. Here’s a sample of what your Google alert email may look like:

Google Web Alert for: “low bidder”
McGraw-Hill Construction | ENR - American Bridge-Kraemer Team …
A joint venture of American Bridge Co., Coraopolis, Pa., and Edward Kraemer & Sons Inc., Plain, Wisc., is the apparent low bidder to build the bascule …
This as-it-happens Google Alert is brought to you by Google.

Procurement Content from Specific Websites

If there are websites that you visit frequently because they update content on a regular basis, see if there’s an RSS feed option on their website.

A RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is basically a way for you to stay automatically updated on new content from websites (similar to the Google alert). However, subscribing to an RSS feed and reading the content from the feed is a bit more complicated than the Google alert process. To read RSS content, you’ll need software that “reads” the content or “aggregates” it. Google offers a free RSS aggregator called Google Reader at www.google.com/reader, but there are also a variety of other RSS aggregators out there. Once you’ve set up your account, you can click on RSS feed options on your favorite websites and add them to your feed reader, so you can access new content from all the websites you visit regularly in one place.