Using Philippine Government E-Procurement System (PhilGEPS) data of 19 local government units from years 2016-2018, four out of six key information requirements of local contractors and bidders were answered. Reducing the cost of acquiring information led to increase in bidding confidence, and a more concrete bidding and logistics strategy.

The paper was presented in the 2020 International Symposium on Technology and Society, hosted by the University of Arizona, Tempe, AZ, USA.

This paper explores how open government data can be used to influence suppliers and contractors to participate in public bidding, by minimizing the cost of information acquisition that influence bidding decision and strategy. The researcher conducted data scraping, pre-processing, and exploratory techniques on official procurement data of nineteen (19) Local Government Units (LGUs) in Albay, Philippines, and triangulated results with local government actors, contractors, and businessmen.

The study showed that the existing procurement data mandated by the Philippine procurement law to be released can answer 4 out of 6 key information requirements of bidders, thereby increasing overall bidding confidence. Using dashboards that regularly collate, preprocess, process, and visualize these data can help local procurement competitivenes.

For more information, the paper’s DOI is: 10.1109/ISTAS50296.2020.9462199