Why Company Data Matters

Your Data Business – Series, Issue #3

We spoke with Divna Djordjevic and Diego Sanvito. The team works on behalf of Cerved on the Tender Discovery Service (TDS). TDS supports companies in  perusing new business opportunities. Cerved’s approach is to interlink company information, past participation and/or explicit interests giving to their clients clues about trending business opportunities.

Divna, why is company data so important for Cerved?

Cerved is  an Italian data-driven company – our data enables us to provide high added value services, with focus on Credit information and Marketing & Sales. Our job is to help our clients interpret the present and to face the future with confidence.  Across Italy, over 30,000 businesses and financial institutions rely on us in different phases of their work. We give our clients the data to guide their decisions, the tools to understand it, and a team of people to turn it into action.

What has Cerved worked on lately?

The TDS team has  focused on data enrichment and interlinking company and company related data:

• We developed a machine learning approach for better categorization of tender calls based on the title of  call and going beyond  common procurement vocabulary (CPV) tags.
• Named entities for places and  keywords from tender content helped us redefine the  content and  improve geo referencing of  tender calls.
• Finally we enrich the content of each tender call  with a multi-label approach based on named entities and  Italian data specific categories.

We advanced our tender recommendation approach by modeling the expected behavior of a company, i.e. moving from public tender to similar public tenders recommendation approach,  to include proposing similar tenders using also past tender notices. The latter relying  on historical tender participation and approximate k-nearest neighbors algorithm for building a forest of similarity trees.

Overview of the Tender Discovery Service (TDS)

Diego, could you tell us what’s in it for me as a customer?

In scope of digital marketing solutions  we constantly seek out new ways for profiling and lead qualification services, as well as diligently studying the market and individual sectors to help our clients find new business opportunities. Hence TDS is aimed at marketing and sales leads  in large, SME and small companies  facilitating  search for prospective customers and business growth.

How does your work make a difference?

TDS aims at enabling customers to easily and quickly identify pertinent open public administration tenders, tailored to customer interests and company profiles. The service is a truly data driven solution relying on interlinking  rich company data with open and historical tender calls.

Could you both tell us which challenge lie ahead of you?

Assuring extensive Public Administration  (PA) tender coverage for Italy and harmonization data coming from numerous data sources is a continuous  challenge as the underling PA initiatives are fragmented and subject to constant changes.