3. Streamlined Process Automatic Reporting Activity Notifications Easy to Use Safe & Secure Save Time & Money From Create to Award
4. Success Story Focused in the UAE Member Companies: 629 Bids Processed: USD 4.9 Billion Paper Saved: ~ 4.5 Million Pages ‘We now use Monaqasat exclusively to manage our hundreds of tenders and as a result we have reduced our costs, increased our productivity and communication towards tender stakeholders.’ Mr. Patrick Azar, Senior VP & GM, Abu Dhabi Commercial Engineering
5. The Road Ahead 2010 - UAE 2011 - Qatar, Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon 2012 – Rest of MENA region 2013– Global
Hello everybody, my name is Karim Helal and I am the co-founder and CEO of Monaqasat.com, aleading B2B eTendering solution based in the UAE. I am very happy to be here today to present to you our company and solution and tell you what we’ve got planned for the next few years.So what’s eTendering and why did we create Monaqasat?
A couple of years ago, coming back to the Middle East after 15 years in Canada to work in the family business (architecture) and being the only non-architect in the family, I was given the exciting task of managing tenders.For those of you who don’t know what that means, it basically involves printing thousands of pages of drawings, specifications and contracts, having them stamped page by page, deliver them to the other side of town to get approved by one or more government bodies, have them rejected for seemingly minor details and then repeating these steps for months until it is all approved. But then the real fun begins. You make copies of each of these documents for each of the 5-10 bidders you invite, post an add or send invitation faxes, track which bidders of them have come to collect them, reply to their questions with potentially new documents that have to be again approved by the government and then redistributed to all bidders at the same time if you don’t want them to complain about the fact that they didn’t receive documents on time.Once the bidding is over, you open all the bids and then spend weeks compiling the results and making sure there were no calculation errors or fraud. Only then can you start analyzing the results and awarding your project.End result: you’ve printed tens of thousands of pages, sent dozens if not hundreds of faxes and emails and lost precious weeks that you could have spent actually building your project.At this point you’re probably thinking the same thing we were: is there not an app for that?Well turns out, there wasn’t one that answered all these problem. So we created our own.
After a year of R&D, Monaqasat.com was launched in the UAE. It is a complete, end-to-end web-based eTendering solution that caters to small and large companies and can dramatically reduce their overhead costs and increase efficiency.What has been the reception so far?
Focusing exclusively on the construction market in Abu Dhabi, we today have:629 member companies, including some of the biggest names in the regionProcessed USD 4.9 billion worth of tendersSaved approx. 4.5 million pages of paperADCB was actually so impressed by our solution that they’ve converted their whole process to use our solution.
So what’s next for us?We’ve done pretty well so far haven't’ we?Well looking at the MEED projects and its close to USD 2 TRILLION worth of tenders in the region, we’ve only scratched the surface. We today have 0.03% of the tenders, which leaves us a huge growth opportunity for the next few years as we focus on the region and beyond.We strongly believe that with our track record, our intimate knowledge of the industry and the market, we could get a sizeable chunk of that market within a few years.To help us accelerate this growth, we’re officially launching our Series A round of investments and looking to raise upto USD 5 Million.
We’ve been extremely busy over the last year preparing for this from a technical point of view and we’re soon to launch Monaqasat 2.0 which will be fully multilingual in arabic, english and soon after french and include some amazing new features that compose what we call Social eTendering and allows registered members to discuss, rate, follow and read about companies, products or tenders. Furthermore, companies will be able to customize their online store to add things like their press releases, their portfolio or products if they are suppliers, thus increasing their overall visibility on the site.We will then use this data to provide much better business intelligence to all the parties and answer questions such as:What are the BEST companies for MY project, based on all the previous data, the companies profile, their experience,….What SHOULD be the cost of my tender based on all the previously submitted similar tender?
