The OutreachSystems' Bid Match services provide instant access to local, state, or federal government bids by keyword, location, and category. You can get bid matching services from OutreachSystems by contacting your local APEX Accelerator (formerly known as Procurement Technical Assistance Centers). OutreachSystems does not work directly with government contractors. You will work with your local APEX Accelerator counselor to create the bid match search profile best suited for your business.

You may wonder, "Why set up a bid match search profile when I can easily get the data from SAM and/or DIBBS?" The answer is: Because there are so many more opportunities for you to be aware of. While SAM and DIBBS represent about 50% of the bid opportunities each day, there are many other federal bids not published on SAM, and there are hundreds of thousands of state and local agencies that also release new bids each day, not to mention the international opportunities.

The OutreachSystems' Bid Match services include bids from:

• SAM
• DLA Small Purchases (DIBBS)
• Other Federal Small Purchases
• Blue Tops Sub-Contracts
• USABID State and Local
• Foreign Trade Opportunities

To ensure that you receive only those bid opportunities you are interested in, OutreachSystems works with your APEX Accelerator counselor to ensure that the right keywords are used. When the APEX Accelerator submits keywords, phrases, and product codes (e.g. NSNs, SICs, NAICS) that best describe your client's business via the Neoserra profile set-up screen, they are thoroughly reviewed and fine tuned (by people, not computers!) based on our 30 years of experience. Common keyword misspellings and pluralizations, wildcards, proximity statements, exclude statements, and many other Boolean logic operators are added to your search profiles to produce the most accurate results possible.

Contractors will receive notification e-mails from your program whenever new bid matches are available. These e-mails link you to your own personal page on OutreachSystems' Web site, where you can view the newly posted bid matches as well as all bid matches posted in the last 30 days. The APEX Accelerator counselor can also access this page to help you interpret your newly posted bids.

Why did I get this Bid Match?

At the bottom of every Bid Match article you will find a section called: "Matching Keywords". Listed there you will find one or more keywords that exist in the search profile and that also appeared in the bid match article. One or more of those keywords would have triggered the match, but not necessarily all!

The way the search engine works is that it highlights and lists every keyword in the the bid match output and that also exists in the search profile.

In other words, the "Matching Keywords" section is not just showing you the keywords that triggered the match to occur, it also lists any other keyword from the profile that was found in the article. The best way to explain how this might work is by means of an example. Let's say your search profile includes the following search phrase:

select alarm?<1u>system?

And there is a solicitation that reads as follows:

The object of this procurement notification is to have immediate repair on our SCADA alarm system as the PLC is obsolete. The successful contractor must have the software, cables, and information to expedite the process of repairing the system. Contractor should be prepared to install a new system if deemed necessary, and must have the necessary equipment on hand to do so.

The profile will generate a match with the above solicitation because of the phrase "alarm system" is found in the article. The word "system" by itself will also be highlighted because it is part of the phrase, but the workd "system" in and of itself would not have caused the match. In other words, even though the word "system" (in red above) is highlighted, the match was caused by the complete phase: alarm system.

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