Most people who open a TED notice for the first time close it again within a minute. The layout is dense, the language is translated stiff, and the genuinely useful information is buried among legal boilerplate. But a vehicle tender really only turns on a handful of fields. Once you know which ones, you can triage a notice in the time it takes to read this paragraph.
The five fields that matter
The CPV code. Every notice carries a Common Procurement Vocabulary code — a standardised classification that survives translation because it's just numbers. Anything starting with 34 is a vehicle. 341 is motor vehicles, 34121 is buses and coaches, 34144 is special-purpose vehicles. The code tells you what's being bought before you read a single word of description, which matters when the description is in Lithuanian.
The notice type. A contract notice is a live opportunity — the buyer is asking for bids. A contract award notice is the result — it tells you who won and, often, for how much. If you're hunting for work, you want the former. If you're sizing up a competitor or a market, the latter is the more valuable document.
The deadline. Public procurement runs on hard dates. A submission deadline three weeks out on a cross-border tender requiring translated documentation and a bid bond is, realistically, already closed to you. One eight weeks out is a different proposition. The deadline is the first thing that tells you whether an opportunity is real for your operation.
The buyer and country. A municipal transit authority buying forty low-floor buses behaves nothing like a national ministry framework for ambulances. The buyer type tells you the procurement culture, the likely incumbent, and how relationship-driven the award will be.
The value and quantity. Where present, these are the difference between a tender worth mobilising for and one that isn't. They're also the least reliably published fields — which is its own lesson about this data.
The catch nobody mentions
Those last fields — value, quantity, sometimes even the winner — are frequently missing, malformed, or hidden inside attached PDF documents rather than the structured notice itself. The structured data and the real data are not the same thing, and the gap between them is exactly where most of the useful intelligence lives.
That's a recurring theme: the headline notice is the easy part. The work is in what the notice doesn't tell you directly.
Where to start
If you want to look at real notices, TED is free and public — no account, no fee. Search by CPV code, filter by country, and read a few award notices in your category. Pay attention to how often the fields you care about are actually filled in. That fill rate, more than any single tender, tells you how legible this market really is.