simap.ch is the information system for public procurement in Switzerland and the central platform on which public buyers publish their tenders. It is operated jointly by the federal government and the cantons, which means awards from both levels are findable in one place. For companies selling to the public sector, simap is therefore the entry point to the market.
What is published there
simap carries the tenders themselves with their documents, plus prior notices, corrections and deadline extensions and — often overlooked — the awards made. A publication typically contains the awarding body, the canton, the contract type, the procedure type, the deadlines, and the tender documents for download. Award publications announce who received the contract. Over time, that award data is one of the most informative publicly available sources on the Swiss procurement market.
Why award publications are underrated
Most suppliers use simap solely to search for new tenders and ignore the award side entirely. Yet over a few months the published awards answer questions that otherwise remain pure speculation: which suppliers regularly win with which awarding body? At what magnitudes are contracts awarded in my segment? How many bidders typically compete? A company analysing that data systematically makes the go/no-go decision on a defensible basis rather than on instinct — and that is economically the most important decision in the whole process.
The limits of search
simap is a publication platform, not a research environment. Search works on keywords and categories, and that is exactly where it fails in practice: awarding bodies name the same service very differently. An IT provider searching for software development does not find the procedure tendered as a specialist application programme or application maintenance. A construction firm misses a lot because it runs under a trade designation absent from its own vocabulary. That is not a flaw of the platform but a consequence of the awarding body publishing in its own professional language.
The language question
Publication is in the official language of the awarding body. A tender from the canton of Vaud appears in French, one from Ticino in Italian. Restricting your search and your work to German therefore excludes a substantial share of the Swiss procurement market — not because access is barred, but through self-limitation. For suppliers whose service can be delivered irrespective of language, this is one of the simplest ways to enlarge the addressable field.
Relationship to third-party services
Services exist around simap that process, monitor or further work the publications. One difference matters: some scrape published pages, others use official access to the simap interface. Official access delivers structured, complete data without delay, whereas scraping breaks as soon as a page changes. Either way, one thing holds: what governs any actual bid is always the awarding body’s official documents, not a third party’s rendering of them.
How to use simap systematically
A simple way of working follows from the above. First, think the search field beyond your own terminology and work with the wording awarding bodies use. Second, follow not only tenders but also awards in your segment. Third, cross the language boundary deliberately where the service permits. Fourth, do not make the checking depend on one person’s discipline — deadlines in procurement are hard and a missed publication cannot be made up. A company doing those four things gets considerably more out of a free public platform than the average supplier.