Rejected: what you can still find out now

The rejection arrives by email, three lines long: the contract is to be awarded to another company. From exactly this moment, you have rights that give you valuable information, and a short window in which things can still be changed.

What you receive automatically

Before the contract is awarded, the contracting authority must notify the unsuccessful bidders. Section 134(1) of the Act against Restraints of Competition (GWB) requires three pieces of information: the name of the company whose bid is to be accepted, the reasons why your bid was not successful and the earliest date on which the contract can be concluded.

This notification triggers the standstill period. The contract may be concluded no earlier than ten calendar days after it was sent, or fifteen if it was sent by post. This is the only window in which the contract award can still be stopped.

Your right to genuine feedback

Section 62 of the Public Procurement Regulation (VgV) gives you more than the standard rejection. At your request, the contracting authority must inform you within fifteen days of the characteristics and relative advantages of the successful bid.

This is the real lever. You learn what distinguished the successful bid and where your next bid can improve. Was it the price? A concept criterion? A better score for the qualifications of the staff? This information is the only reliable feedback you receive on the quality of your bid, and it costs you one email.

The limit is the protection of the winner's trade and business secrets. You are not entitled to learn the exact price, but you are entitled to learn in which criteria the other bid scored better.

What you do not find out

There is no complete ranking with all bidders and their scores. You find out who won and why their bid was better, but not where you placed or how the other bidders performed.

Full access to the files is only available in review proceedings under Section 165 GWB, and even there it is limited to what is necessary to pursue your legal rights, excluding third parties' business secrets. Anyone who wants access merely out of curiosity will not get it.

What is published later

After the contract has been concluded, the contracting authority publishes a contract award notice. It states the successful bidder, usually the contract value and the number of bids received. For contracts above the thresholds, it appears in the EU's Official Journal and remains permanently accessible via the TED database.

This does not reveal a ranking, but it does show the size of the field. Whether you competed against three or against eighteen bidders makes a considerable difference when assessing your success rate. Across several procedures, this builds a picture of who regularly wins in your market and on what scale.

What you can find out about competitors

Contract award notices show which company wins contracts with which procurement office and on what scale. This information is public and can be analysed legally.

Two limitations apply. First, the contract value is not reported in all notices, so conclusions about pricing are incomplete. Second, this data only covers contracts above the thresholds. A company with few entries may be very active in the below-threshold segment.

How a competitor subsequently performed the contract, whether on schedule, whether with change orders, whether to the client's satisfaction, is not publicly documented. The competition register (Wettbewerbsregister) only records serious infringements and is not open to public inspection, but can only be queried by procurement offices. Anyone who promises you such performance data cannot have it from a reliable source.

What to do with the information

Keep a simple overview of your bids: procurement office, subject matter, award criteria and their weighting, your result, the reason for the rejection under Section 62 VgV, the winner. After ten to fifteen procedures, you will see patterns.

Typical insights from such overviews: you win significantly more often in procedures with a high quality share than in purely price-based awards. Or: your success rate differs clearly between procurement offices. Or: one and the same piece of evidence repeatedly tips the balance. Each of these insights changes which tenders you choose to work on in the future, and that is worth more than any improvement to an individual bid.