Government procurement involves tons of procedures and paper works that are to be properly maintained during the allocation of tenders. These voluminous paperwork store essential bureaucratic workflows, which must be meticulously preserved as lapses may incur heavy losses to the government and eventually to the economy of a nation. Procurement is an important activity, which is similar to the nature of traditional B2B actions. During the olden times government would undertake these activities in the traditional ways, which was tedious, monotonous and time consuming as well. The other common pitfalls that were faced by the government procurement agencies are absence of an automated procurement policy, subjective judgment of bids, and inordinate delay in tender processing and spiraling administrative overheads. To overhaul these issues, governments are fast pushing to use, web based tendering systems, in order to enhance the efficiency of the tender processes. Further, it also carries other benefits such as easy access of tender documents, demand aggregation, reduced inventory costs, and transactional effectiveness. Established in the year 1997, as a small software setup, Antares System Ltd has been catering electronic procurement services to government agencies such as Defense, Railways Bank& Financial Institution and Power/Energy since 2002.

The company’s flagship product Tenderwizard, hosts a variety of end to end solutions for e tendering and e procurement. The government to business, web based product is crafted to purchase goods and services through quotations, tenders, catalogues and reverse auctions. Moreover Tenderwizard `brings in additional features such as creation of vendor database, e tender corrigendum announcement, internet payment getaway, and management of tender contract operations to name a few. “Tenderwizard is the first e-governance product to be offered in India on SaaS. The government departments need not purchase our product as a whole but use this on “pay per usage” basis. Since the charges are per tender basis, the payment to service provider from the department will only be after they use the product to do procurement activities. Other than this pay per usage, there is NO upfront customization or deployment fee to the departments”, says Suresh Kumar CEO. Further, the company is embarked on a mission to make its products more institutive and feature rich to match the expectations of the customers. “Tenderwizard is extremely flexible with all its features driven by customer defined flags and series of user driven templates, based on customer needs” adds Suresh.

Antares is encouraging its think tanks to endeavor to come out with latest technologies that can be included as an additional feature in the Tenderwizard, to make it more flexible, scalable and manageable. Moreover, the company is also allocating its large budget resources on research and developments to come up with avant-garde art technologies and frameworks to stay ahead of the curve. Barring myriads of services that Tenderwizard offers, the company also hosts other features in their product list that is designed to nurture the needs of its clients. For instance, Antares’s integrated mobile application such as tender search, auction search, bid for live auctions are designed to alert bidders on their devices, that allows auctions from various departments and enables bidders for multiple auction in a single set up. These applications work on major platforms including, iphone, android and Windows. In addition, the company also carries cache of other products such as e registration and vendor empanelment, online payment getaway solutions and digital signature certificates that attend to users, in their transactions of payment, and help suppliers to get instant registration, and help government to stimulate good ascendancy in tenders and allocations. Their upcoming product BidFactory is designed to bring all tenders from across the country in a single window to the bidder community, with flexibility to work on multiple tender documents simultaneously on multi-user platform within their organization.Further, the company allots its services on pay per usage basis and suggests the government departments to not buy the products out rightly thereby bringing down the additional capital expenditure. Likewise, as the products are offered on the ASP basis, the company thwarts government department from spending huge amounts on infrastructures like data centers, hardware and software system but encourages to use just the internet to achieve their targets.

Now with government department showing concomitance to using e-tendering and e-auctions, Antares strongly advocates that the departments should switch to end to end ERP solutions, that houses modules such as integrates accounting, PO processing, contact management system, e-marketplace, and work estimation to name a few. Third party software suppliers like ERP and, E-payment are useful resources to address concerns and provide seamless solutions to the clients and hence Antares widely believes in collaborating with these third party vendors, to improve the efficiency and the quality of developing their custom applications. Further, with the whole world going mobile, the company strongly exponents the need to transfer all the e-tendering and e-auctions to the mobile platform alluding better customer experience.