Mercell

When you start using Mercell Bidding, one of the best things you can do early on is set up a monitoring profile that actually matches your business. A well built search profile helps you focus on relevant opportunities, instead of spending hours filtering through tenders that weren’t a good fit in the first place. Anita Torgersen, our Value Delivery Specialist, has spent more than 10 years helping suppliers set up and adjust their monitoring profiles. She works closely with customers every day and knows where things usually go wrong, and what small changes make tender monitoring easier over time. Below are her best tips to help you build a monitoring profile that’s accurate, flexible, and easy to tweak as your needs change. This ensures that you have a much better bidding experience from day one. 🤩 And if you want a head start, try our AI Profile Builder! It can suggest relevant keywords and CPV codes and help you set up a monitoring profile faster than you can finish your coffee ☕

How many spreadsheets are holding your procurement plan together right now? 👀 Join our free live webinar this Thursday, 29 January from 10AM – 10.45AM, where we’ll share what better planning looks like under the Procurement Act. If you want more clarity and less manual chaos this year, this one’s for you. Register now and join us live 🙌 https://lnkd.in/eFWqugAy Richard South ▪️ Marian Oram MCIPS ▪️ Stu McAndrew

What an amazing start to the ELT Live Tour 2026! At the end of 2025, we had the pleasure of coming together in Utrecht and Copenhagen. Today, we kicked off the new year with fantastic energy in the Stockholm office exactly the kind of start one could hope for. We even got to sing a birthday song for a fantastic colleague and record several great podcast episodes along the way. This is how we connect as humans at Mercell. This is the level of commitment from our Executive Leadership Team. 1-to-1 encounters. Live Q&A. No script. No jargon. No slides. Just humans…Just the way we like it.

At a high level, I see public organisations choosing between two very different paths in how they run procurement. One path is to respond as needs emerge. A new requirement appears, and a new tool is added to manage it. One for planning. One for sourcing. One for contracts. One for spend. They are connected where possible, often through workarounds, exports and manual checks. It works - up to a point. The other path is more deliberate. Instead of adding tools around the process, organisations bring the work together. Planning, sourcing, supplier interaction and contracts are treated as one connected flow. Data is captured once. Visibility is built in. Decisions made early don’t disappear later. In the Nordics, high maturity has historically made the first path viable for a long time. Skilled teams compensated for fragmentation. Processes held together through experience and trust. Across Europe, pressure is now exposing the limits of that model. More policy objectives, tighter markets and higher scrutiny make fragmentation costly. Not just operationally, but in decision quality. This is not a question of compliance. Both paths can be compliant. It comes down to how much effort organisations spend simply keeping procurement aligned and how much insight is lost instead of carried into the next procurement. Organisations choosing the second path tend to shift the conversation: From managing tenders to managing procurement as a system. Mercell Tendering is built for organisations making that choice, because they want procurement to work as one whole - end to end.

Competitive dialogue is considered one of the most complex procurement process. That’s why many contracting authorities either avoid it altogether or build timelines that stretch far beyond what’s really needed. Cologne Bonn Airport showed there’s another way. For the complete redesign of its airport lounges, the airport ran a competitive dialogue fully digitally, with a strong focus on structure and data from the start. The setup and publication took four weeks. Seventeen bidders took part in the participation phase. The dialogue ran for twelve weeks, with every exchange documented and traceable. Service specifications were finalised based on the dialogue, followed by a clearly structured tendering and negotiation phase. From start to finish, the entire competitive dialogue was completed digitally in six months. Purchasing, specialist departments and suppliers all worked with the same structured information in one central workflow. No more “Who has which version?” No more “Where are we in the process?” No more searching, sorting or checking documents. Just clear data, clear steps and clear decisions.

Still planning procurement outside your tendering system? 😬 In 2026, there’s a better way. Under the UK Procurement Act 2023, planning and pipelines must be visible and auditable. When planning sits outside the system, compliance is already at risk. Join our free live webinar on 29 January (10.00AM–10.45AM), created specifically for UK public sector procurement professionals. See how connected procurement planning supports better decision-making, compliance, and transparency in practice, including a live walkthrough of Mercell Tendering. Start the year with more clarity and control. Register now and join us live! 🇬🇧 https://lnkd.in/eFWqugAy Richard South ▪️ Stu McAndrew ▪️ Marian Oram MCIPS

Faster procurement doesn’t usually start with legal changes. It starts with changing how the work actually gets done. When Cologne Bonn Airport looked at how long it took to procure ground service equipment, the issue wasn’t the regulation. It was how fragmented the process had become. So they took a different approach and moved the procurement into a fully digital setup, using a DPS. The DPS went live in just one week. Documents were fully digitised, participation requests were handled quickly, and mini-competitions, including for eGPUs, ran without friction. The result is a repeatable process the airport can rely on long term. The biggest impact wasn’t just speed. Digitalisation brought purchasing and specialist departments closer together. Fewer misunderstandings. No switching between systems. Better data quality. The process moved faster because it was structured and systematic, not because corners were cut. If you want a clear breakdown of how this was done, we explain it in our DPS Whitepaper. You can download it here: https://lnkd.in/eDkqAv5K

My 2026 prediction for public procurement in Europe: preparedness will outperform process. Public procurement in Europe is often discussed in terms of rules, thresholds and processes. That won’t change. But they don’t fully explain why some organisations perform better than others. The procurement organisations that perform best will be the ones that invest in preparedness long before a tender is launched. We already see this in Europe today. In defence and energy, several countries have had to procure faster than planned in recent years. Where supplier markets were already mapped, data structured and contracts understood, procurement could move quickly without lowering standards. Where this groundwork was missing, even urgent needs became slow and difficult. Preparedness means: - knowing supplier markets before demand peaks - having visibility into existing contracts and dependencies - working with data that can actually be reused Regulation is not Europe’s problem. Lack of readiness is. Public procurement in Europe will not be defined by who has the most detailed procedures, but by who is best prepared when pressure increases.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year from all of us at Mercell. 🎄 We are signing off for the holidays and spending the next days with family and friends. Before we do, we want to say thank you to all our customers for the conversations, the feedback and the time you spent with us this year. It shaped much of what we released in 2025 and what we are planning for in 2026. We also want to thank the partners who worked with us this year. Your collaboration has meant a lot. And lastly, a thank you to everyone inside Mercell. Everything we delivered this year came from their work, their patience and their ability to solve problems that rarely have simple answers. We hope you all also get a chance to pause, recharge and ignore your inbox for a little while. We will be back in January, ready for a fresh start. 🌟

If buyers had a Christmas wish list, it would probably be short, practical and deeply relatable to anyone who has ever run a tender. The carousel walks through a few wishes that appear every December, and how the right tools can make these wishes come true.