How SIMAP works: a practical guide for Swiss SMEs
SIMAP is the federal portal for Swiss public tenders. Here is what it covers, what it does not, and how to use it without getting blindsided.
If you bid on Swiss public tenders, sooner or later you end up on simap.ch. It is the official federal portal for public procurement notices, the canonical place where the Swiss Confederation, most cantons, and many municipalities publish what they want to buy. It also has a 2008-era interface, fragmentary multilingual coverage, and notable blind spots. Here is what SIMAP is, what it is not, and how to use it without getting blindsided.
What SIMAP actually is
SIMAP (Système d’Information sur les Marchés Publics en Suisse) is operated by the Verein simap.ch on behalf of the federal Confederation and the cantons (the BPUK acts as the cantonal counterpart). It hosts three things:
- Notices of upcoming tenders (Ausschreibungen / appels d’offres / bandi).
- Award notices (Zuschläge / adjudications / aggiudicazioni), published after a contract is awarded.
- Corrigenda and amendments to either of the above.
Each notice carries structured fields (buyer, CPV codes, deadlines, accepted languages) and a free-text description. Attachments, meaning the procurement specs themselves, sit behind a registration wall: you have to create a free SIMAP account, open the notice, and download the dossier.
That is the simple version. The complications start when you ask “is every public tender in Switzerland on SIMAP?” The honest answer is no.
What SIMAP does not cover
Sub-threshold contracts. Switzerland’s procurement law (the federal BöB and the intercantonal IVöB) only requires publication above certain CHF thresholds. Below those, contracts go via the Einladungsverfahren (invitation procedure) or as freihändige Vergabe (direct award), and many never appear on SIMAP at all. The market knowledge that “this canton typically buys X” is missing from the portal.
Cantonal portals running in parallel. A handful of cantons run their own portals alongside SIMAP. Geneva and Vaud famously have separate platforms. Notices may appear on the canton’s portal first, on SIMAP second, or only on one of the two. SMEs bidding in Romandie should monitor both.
Tender amendments after publication. SIMAP notifies you when a tender is first published, but amendments (the Q&A round, corrections to deadlines, clarifications on specs) propagate inconsistently. If you saved a notice last Tuesday and the buyer published a Q&A document on Thursday, the email digest sometimes arrives and sometimes doesn’t.
Timely award outcomes. Even when contracts are awarded, publication of the award notice is not always prompt. Some buyers publish within a week; others publish months later or never. If you want to know who won a 2025 contract, you may have to wait until 2027.
Creating an account
You can browse SIMAP anonymously, but downloading procurement documents requires an account. Registration takes a few minutes and asks for your company UID: the Unternehmens-Identifikationsnummer, your federal business identifier. If you are a Swiss SME, you have one whether or not you have used it; look it up on uid.admin.ch.
Once registered, the portal lets you save searches and subscribe to email alerts. The alerting works but is coarse. You can filter by canton, CPV code, and language, but not by semantic content or your actual business profile. A construction electrician in Ticino who wants “anything involving low-voltage installation in any Italian-speaking municipality” will subscribe to too many notices and read most of them by mistake.
Reading a notice
A SIMAP notice has three sections every bidder needs to extract:
Procedure and timeline. Is it open (offen), selective (selektiv), invitation (Einladungs), or direct (freihändig)? When is the Eingabefrist, the bid submission deadline? Is there a site visit, a Q&A deadline, and a separate question-acceptance window?
Eligibility criteria (Eignungskriterien) and award criteria (Zuschlagskriterien). These are different things, and SMEs lose bids by confusing them. The post on eligibility vs award criteria covers the distinction at length. Read both sections of the notice carefully.
The Pflichtenheft. The actual specs. Almost everything that matters for your bid lives in the dossier you download after creating an account.
Notice that the public-facing notice page is intentionally thin. The portal is designed to push you to download the dossier, where the buyer’s real requirements live.
The five things SIMAP will not tell you
After watching thousands of SIMAP notices roll past, the pattern is consistent. The portal will not tell you:
- Whether the contract has a likely incumbent. Buyers rarely write “the same company has won this every two years for the last decade”, but the award history is in the portal if you read it.
- How many bidders the last similar tender attracted. Award notices include the bidder count; tender notices do not. Without cross-referencing, you walk in blind. We dug into what those bid counts actually look like across the last twelve months.
- Whether the deadline is realistic. For complex tenders, a 30-day Eingabefrist may be technically compliant with the WTO/GPA thresholds and still too short for a small bidder to assemble a competitive offer.
- Whether the buyer welcomes Bietergemeinschaften. Some buyers do; some discourage; some forbid. The notice typically buries this in clause structure.
- Whether your offer needs a translation. A German-source notice may welcome French or Italian offers, or not. The acceptable bid languages live in the dossier, not on the surface.
And one piece of context the portal will not give you: the shape of the buyer landscape itself. We pulled the numbers on which Swiss public buyers spend the most over the last twelve months. The concentration is sharper than most SMEs assume.
What we built TenderLift to do
We monitor SIMAP and the cantonal portals continuously, parse each notice into structured fields, machine-translate every notice into all four official languages, and score each one against your business profile. The first sixty seconds with a TenderLift email beats sixty minutes of SIMAP scrolling. Start with the free preview and tell us what you bid on. We will show you what you have been missing.