Tender Services

The Common Procurement Vocabulary consists of a hierarchical list of more than 8000 procurement codes used to categorise EU public tenders.

Bold-E provides a CPV Code Finder utility to help you choose appropriate codes to:

• specify filter settings for the Tenders Notification Service
• categorise a tender to be posted through OJEU or our Tender Publishing Service

Accurate CPV coding ensures the best chance of the the right buyer meeting the right supplier.

The Tenders Notification Service delivers notices that have been categorised with CPV codes.
When registering for this service, you may select as many CPV codes as are required in your filter settings.
Your choice of CPV codes does not affect the price of this service.

For the purposes of choosing filter settings for the Tenders Notification Service or for categorising a tender to be posted through OJEU or the Tender Publishing Service, it is only necessary to understand that the Common Procurement Vocabulary is based on a tree structure.

The first 2 digits of a CPV code identify the top level categories. The following 6 digits provide an increasing level of precision from left to right. The more zeros on the right - the more general the code is.

Example:

• 45000000: Construction work
• 45300000: Building installation work
• 45310000: Electrical installation work
• 45314000: Installation of telecommunications equipment
• 45314100: Installation of telephone exchanges

Note: In this example the CPV code for "Installation of telephone exchanges" appears several levels beneath "Construction work". To many this might not be the first place you would look for CPV codes relating to telephone exchanges. This is where the CPV Code Finder is invaluable since it allows you to search for CPV codes that contain a given text. For example if you used the CPV Code Finder to search for CPV Codes containing "telephone exchange", you would get the following:

• 32551200: Telephone exchanges
• 32552310: Digital telephone exchanges
• 45314100: Installation of telephone exchanges

As you can see, the first two results fall under the top level category "32000000 : Radio, television, communication, telecommunication and related equipment and apparatus" - where you might expect.

The CPV Code Finder helps you find CPV codes you might otherwise miss.