Data Science in Promoting the Participation of SMEs in Public Biddings in Santa Catarina State, Brazil: The Case of BIEL

This paper addresses public bidding from the perspective of developing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It aims to present a prototype, BIEL, to make it easier for suppliers to locate notices to participate in, increasing their competitiveness and access to public bidding. The context of this research is SMEs’ participation in public biddings in Santa Catarina (SC) State, Brazil, in which suppliers use the SC Purchasing Portal to seek bidding notices. Diagnosing the problem situation requires simplifying the search for notices and allowing suppliers to find those notices that correspond to the items they work with efficiently. The intervention consists of developing an application using web scraping techniques with a dashboard that allows suppliers to search for specific items and obtain a list of corresponding notices. The paper contributes to applying these technologies in public bidding, facilitating SMEs' access to bidding processes. The developed prototype demonstrates promising results, although some limitations can be overcome to improve search accuracy. Making the application's source code available in a public repository on GitHub also contributes to transparency and collaboration in developing technological solutions in the public sector.