Three Weeks of Work in a Few Minutes: Why Your Community Needs to Learn BI Prozorro

Two to three weeks of manual work can be cut down to a few minutes. Risks in tenders can be spotted before auditors ever get involved. A complete picture of what a community is purchasing can be pulled together in just a few clicks. These are the kinds of opportunities that BI Prozorro opens up for local government officials who work with procurement. In March, Transparency International Ukraine’s DOZORRO and Transparent Cities programs held a training session called “Transparent procurement for city councils: tools for analysis and operational management”, where participants learned to use the analytics module in their day-to-day work. We spoke with representatives from the communities of Boiarka, Kamianske, and Sheptytskyi to find out how their new skills are helping them analyze procurement, identify risks, and save working time.

Vitalina Harkava, Head of the Public Procurement Sector, Executive Committee of Boiarka City Council 

When the legal department asked her to review every contract with additional agreements signed since 2021, Vitalina knew right away this wouldn’t be easy. The task covered 300–400 contracts. Before the training, she had already used the analytics module for price monitoring and looking up procurement information, but by her own admission, her knowledge of the tool was fairly superficial. The legal department’s request pushed her to look for a new approach. Reviewing several hundred contracts by hand, finding every additional agreement, and analyzing the changes would have taken at least two to three weeks.

The solution came during the training itself. At one of the webinars, Vitalina described her task and asked whether BI Prozorro could handle it. The answer turned out to be surprisingly simple: yes.

“Iryna showed me in literally 10-15 minutes how to do it in BI Prozorro. Honestly, I was amazed. Work I’d mentally set aside two-three weeks for suddenly became so much simpler. All I had left to do was the analysis itself and writing up the results,” she recalls. 

That was the moment Vitalina truly grasped BI Prozorro’s practical value. 

Still, she admits it took some time to get comfortable with the tool. The filters gave her the most trouble — one wrong step and the data she needed would disappear. So she kept going back to the recorded sessions, working through each step again from the start. That’s how she gradually built up an understanding of how the module works.

But the biggest discovery for her wasn’t the time savings — it was the ability to see how other communities operate. That’s exactly what she chose to explore for her homework assignment: what other communities procure, how many contracts they sign, how often they amend them, and which procurements they cancel. 

“I learned a lot about how other communities work and the mistakes they’ve made. That’s useful, because it means I don’t have to repeat the same mistakes in my own work,” Vitalina says. 

Since then, she’s started looking at other communities’ procurement in a new light. She believes, procurement data can reveal more about a community than any report. All it takes is a look at where the money goes to understand its priorities — road repairs, infrastructure development, or other projects.

Vitalina also uses the tool to spot risk in procurement. With Ukraine’s State Audit Service and other oversight bodies conducting regular checks, she says contracting authorities need to work proactively — analyzing their own contracts and flagging anything that might raise questions during a monitoring review.

“We need to check ourselves before an external monitoring review comes to us. We have to see our own risks and fix them ahead of time,” Vitalina says.

Oksana Karakai, Chief Specialist, Accounting and Finance Department, Kamianske City Council

“I wouldn’t even have noticed that.” That thought crosses Oksana Karakai’s mind more often than she’d like when she reviews State Audit Service monitoring reports and reads through auditors’ findings on other contracting authorities’ procurement.

Working at Kamianske City Council, Oksana regularly tracks procurement not just for her own community but for other organizations as well. She’s especially drawn to monitoring reports — which procurements get flagged, what violations auditors find, and what catches their attention when they review documents. After the BI Prozorro training, Oksana started paying much closer attention to these reports. Now she treats many auditors’ findings as pointers for her own work — a chance to catch risks before they become problems. 

“When I see a comment or a question from an auditor, I immediately check whether something similar could happen in our case,” she says.

Just a few months ago, Oksana only had a passing familiarity with BI Prozorro. She first encountered the module at a training session on price analysis, where she only managed to get comfortable with one section — but it was enough to realize the system had far more to offer. That’s what led her to sign up for TI Ukraine’s training. She says the practical exercises helped the most; working through them was how she gradually got a handle on the interface and the logic behind the module.

Oksana felt the practical benefit almost immediately. She needed to put together a list of contracts for the year. In the past, that meant gathering the information by hand, cross-checking it against her own spreadsheets, and making sure nothing had been missed. In BI Prozorro, the task went far faster.

“It took a bit of figuring out at first, but once I understood how it worked, I had a ready-made table right away. It’s incredibly fast — I mean, super fast,” Oksana recalls.

She says the whole task took about twenty minutes. Previously, putting together a sample like that could easily take half a day.

“You had to gather everything, check it, and format it properly. Here, in a few clicks, I got a full summary of every contract for the entire year,” she says.

Oksana believes the ability to work with open data and analytical tools is becoming increasingly important for local governments. However, she’s noticed that not everyone is ready to pick up new tools and change familiar ways of working.

She sums up BI Prozorro’s main advantage simply: it’s a large body of information that’s already organized and gathered in one place. Instead of spending hours hunting for data by hand, you can find it — and analyze it — in the same tool, in a fraction of the time.

Not long ago, she used to search for procurement records on the Prozorro portal herself, scrolling through dozens of pages and losing a lot of time in the process. Today, most of those tasks get done much faster. That’s why Oksana’s advice to anyone just starting out with BI Prozorro is not to be afraid of investing time in learning it — it’s nothing compared to the time it will end up saving.

Nataliia Kostenko, Chief Specialist, Department of Digital Transformation, Information Policy and Transparency, Sheptytskyi City Council

For Nataliia Kostenko, the BI Prozorro training wasn’t an introduction from scratch. She’s worked with BI modules for a long time and regularly uses them to analyze her community’s work. Even so, the training gave her a fresh perspective on what the analytics could do. 

“The main benefit is that we see the whole picture at once,” Nataliia says. 

She explains that an authorized procurement officer typically looks at one procurement or tender at a time. BI Prozorro makes it possible to see procurement across the entire community — from the executive committee down to municipal enterprises. That kind of overview helps not just with analysis, but with spotting risks and making decisions based on them.

When Nataliia showed the BI tools to staff in Sheptytskyi City Council’s land department, their reaction was strikingly emotional. Within minutes, the system generated a data sample that used to take hours to prepare.

“They were amazed that we could pull a complete sample for any given period in a single minute,” Nataliia recalls. 

Since the training, Nataliia has been using the module more actively to analyze the community’s biggest suppliers. It gives her a quick view of which companies work most often with the municipal enterprises and the executive committee. 

“This way we can see the scale of procurement, the scale of company participation in it, and draw our own conclusions,” Nataliia explains.

In her view, the real value of analytical tools lies in helping communities work more transparently, make decisions faster, and use limited staff resources more effectively.

“We used to have to collect a lot of information manually. Now we can see the whole system at a glance and make decisions based on data,” Nataliia says. 

That’s why she’s convinced analytical tools have long stopped being a nice-to-have for communities. Today, they’re one of the key tools of local governance.

The three communities’ stories are different. For one, BI Prozorro became a faster way to work with contracts; for another, a tool for finding risk; for a third, a way to see the whole procurement system at once. But all the training participants agree on one thing: data analysis is no longer a nice extra skill — it’s steadily becoming an essential part of how local governments do their work.

For city council staff or other local government representatives looking to get started with BI Prozorro, we recommend beginning with the video lecture series How to Manage Procurement.

This material was made possible with the support of the MATRA program of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine.