The economics of the alternate
Specified products anchor the buyer, but procurement rules in the DACH region generally allow equivalent alternatives unless explicitly excluded. For suppliers, alternates are attractive twice over: they open positions that would otherwise be lost, and they often carry better margins than fighting on price for the specified item.
Equivalence is a documentation exercise
An alternate wins only if the buyer can approve it without effort. That means mapping every relevant attribute of the specified product to the proposed alternative: dimensions, materials, certifications, norm references. Vague claims of equivalence create risk for the buyer and get rejected.
Finding alternates automatically
Manually identifying alternates requires deep two-sided knowledge: the competitor's product and your own catalog. AI-based matching changes the economics. When requirements are extracted as structured attributes, the system can propose your closest equivalent for every foreign-specified position and generate the comparison table alongside it.
Playing it fair and long-term
Alternates work as a trust strategy, not a bait-and-switch. Flag them transparently, price them honestly, and accept when the buyer insists on the original. The goal is to become the supplier who always brings an intelligent option to the table.
We stopped seeing competitor specs as closed doors. Now every tender is an opportunity to show what our portfolio can do.
What comes next
Identify the competitor products most often specified against you, prepare equivalence documentation for your top alternates, and automate the discovery for the long tail.