Frequently Asked Questions

TenderIntel is an AI-powered tender aggregation platform built by Ideazshuttle LLC. It automatically scans Pakistan's leading newspapers every morning, extracts tender notices using OCR and large language models, and presents them in a single searchable interface.

Instead of manually checking multiple newspaper websites and classified sections each day, procurement teams and contractors can log in once and see all active tenders in one place — searchable by sector, status, and deadline.

TenderIntel is designed for:

• Procurement officers who need to monitor government and corporate tenders daily.
• Contractors & vendors looking for new business opportunities across sectors.
• Consultants & law firms tracking public procurement for clients.
• Corporate compliance teams monitoring competitor tender activity.

No. TenderIntel runs entirely in your browser. There are no plugins, no desktop apps, and no spreadsheets to manage. Every page is server-rendered — all data is live from the database.

TenderIntel scrapes the following active e-paper sources daily:

A newspaper is marked inactive when its e-paper portal is temporarily unavailable, has changed its URL structure, or blocks automated access. The team monitors these and re-enables them once access is restored.

Inactive newspapers do not run during the daily auto-scrape to avoid failed jobs and error noise.

Historical data depends on when each newspaper was first added to the platform. From that date forward, all scraped tenders are retained indefinitely. You can use the Manual Scrape tool to backfill any specific past date as long as the newspaper's e-paper archive is still available online.

Yes. Contact Ideazshuttle at info@ideazshuttle.com with the newspaper name and its e-paper URL. The team will assess the site's structure and add a compatible fetcher — typically within a few business days.

Each newspaper goes through a 6-stage automated pipeline:

1. 1
   Fetch Pages

   Downloads all e-paper page images for the target date from the newspaper's website.
2. 2
   OCR — Text Extraction

   Each page image is processed by Tesseract OCR. Urdu newspapers use specialised models for Nastaliq script.
3. 3
   Image Storage

   Page images are uploaded to S3 (or saved locally as a fallback), addressable by newspaper + date + page number.
4. 4
   LLM Extraction

   OCR text is sent to a large language model which identifies tender notices and extracts structured fields: title, company, sector, deadline, reference number, and requirements.
5. 5
   Deduplication

   Each extracted tender is matched against existing records by newspaper + date + page + title fingerprint. Duplicates are skipped; near-duplicates are updated.
6. 6
   Database Save & Log

   New tenders are written to MySQL. A ScrapeLog entry records pages, OCR confidence, tender counts, and duration.

English-language papers (Dawn, The News, Business Recorder) consistently achieve 85–95% OCR accuracy on clean newsprint. Urdu papers vary more due to complex script rendering. Structured fields like tender title, company, and deadline are extracted with high precision for well-formatted notices.

When a tender is extracted, the system generates a fingerprint from: newspaper_id + published_date + page_number + normalised_title. If a matching fingerprint already exists, the record is updated rather than duplicated. Re-running a scrape for the same date is safe.

Go to Tenders in the app navigation. The filter bar supports keyword search (full-text across title, summary, and requirements), sector filter, status filter (Active / Closing Soon / Expired), and date range. Filters combine — you can search for "hospital equipment" in the "Healthcare" sector with status "Active" simultaneously.

The Dashboard gives you a real-time snapshot: Active Tenders, Closing Soon (≤7 days), Expired, Today's New, Tenders by Sector (bar chart of top 10), and Recent Tenders (8 most recent with quick links).

The Deadline Alerts page groups active tenders by urgency: Due Today, Due Tomorrow, This Week (7 days), and Next Week (8–14 days). Tenders without a recorded deadline are counted separately.

• Active (green, pulsing) — open for submission; deadline more than 7 days away.
• Closing Soon (amber) — deadline within 7 days. Prioritise review.
• Expired (grey) — deadline has passed. Retained for reference.
• Unknown (blue) — no deadline could be extracted from the original notice.

Statuses are recalculated automatically each day.

The daily auto-scrape runs at 07:00 AM Pakistan Standard Time (PKT / UTC+5) every day. It processes all newspapers marked as active. Results appear in the Tenders list within 15–30 minutes, depending on how many newspapers are active.

The scheduler has a 1-hour misfire grace window. If the server restarts within 60 minutes of 7:00 AM, the missed job executes automatically on startup. If offline for more than an hour, use the Manual Scrape page to backfill the missed date.

• Active — deadline is more than 7 days from today.
• Closing Soon — deadline is 7 days or fewer. A visual alert to prompt immediate action.

Statuses transition automatically as the deadline approaches — no manual intervention needed.

No. Expired tenders are retained permanently — useful for researching which organisations issued tenders in a given period, estimating future volumes, and audit trails. Use the Status: Expired filter on the Tenders page to view them.

Use Manual Scrape to backfill a specific past date the auto-scraper missed, re-scrape today's paper after a newspaper corrects a page, test a newly configured newspaper, or run a single newspaper immediately without waiting for 7:00 AM PKT.

Partial means the pipeline started but could not complete fully — e.g. no pages returned, all pages below OCR confidence threshold, or a timeout during a Scrape All batch. Any successfully extracted tenders up to the point of failure are still saved.

• Backend — FastAPI (Python 3.11+) with async SQLAlchemy ORM.
• Database — MySQL with full-text indexes for keyword search.
• OCR — Tesseract (English + Urdu) with per-page confidence scoring.
• LLM — Large language model for structured tender field extraction.
• Scheduling — APScheduler (embedded) + Celery (optional distributed).
• Image storage — AWS S3 with local disk fallback.
• Frontend — Jinja2 server-rendered HTML; no JavaScript frameworks.

Yes. TenderIntel exposes a versioned REST API at /api/v1/. The interactive documentation (Swagger UI) is at /docs and the OpenAPI schema at /openapi.json. The API can integrate tender data into internal systems, Power BI dashboards, or custom notification workflows.

Contact the Ideazshuttle team at info@ideazshuttle.com. Include the newspaper name, the date you attempted to scrape, and any error message shown. The team typically responds within one business day.

Email info@ideazshuttle.com with the tender ID (visible in the URL, e.g. /ui/tenders/abc123), the field that appears incorrect, and the correct value from the original notice.

Visit ideazshuttlellc.com — Ideazshuttle's full range of AI engineering, agentic systems, and strategic advisory services. Offices in Harrisonburg VA (HQ), Fujairah UAE, and Karachi Pakistan.