Open Contracting Data summary

The Open Contracting Data summary indicates the amount of data available month by month in the OCPO procurement data API for each organ of state (Departments, Municipalities, Public Entities).

Thousands of instances of procurement take place every year. Performing oversight - ensuring these procurement processes are fair to suppliers and ensure value for money from the taxes funding this procurement - is a huge task.

National and Provincial departments and public entities are required to publish their tenders and tender awards on the eTender Portal so that the various institutions and public who want to carry out oversight have efficient and timely access to information for public oversight.

This tool makes it easy to see how many procurement processes are typically started (with a tender) each month for a given organ of state, and when there are changes in this pattern, perhaps due to different procurement activity at different times of the year, or due to gaps in the data.

It is important to note that gaps could mean missing data, but it can also mean that the institution simply didn't need to advertise any tenders in a given month.

Methodology

Data is fetched from the OCPO API twice daily. This data is formatted as Open Contracting Data Standard Releases. Releases are compiled, meaning different parts of the same procurement processe are combined and counted as a single procurement process if the same OCID was used when publishing different parts at different times.

The number of procurement processes are then counted for each month, for each organ of state. It also counts how many of those have information about planning, tender, awards, and contracts.

Since the tender period start date is used for the summary, only procurement processes which have tender information including a start date are included in the summary. OCDS releases in the dataset which can not be linked to a tender are not counted in this summary.