Your Advisor walks through finding federal contract opportunities on the Defense Logistics Agency DIBBS portal. Search by nomenclature or NSN, use asterisks to broaden keyword searches, and filter by technical documents or set-asides. Recent RFQs show up with about a 24-hour delay, and you can download a full day's solicitations as a ZIP file, like Jan 22 with roughly 3,000 files.
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Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Step by Step guide on how to search in dibs. If you're looking to land federal contracts, you need to know how to navigate dibs, which is the Defense Logistics Agency's portal that posts thousands of opportunities every day. But here's the thing, it's not as straightforward as it seems. But don't worry, I'm going to walk you through it step by step so you can start finding the opportunities right away. Make sure that you grab my free guide top 10 dibs insider tips in the description to help you avoid common mistakes and find the best opportunities faster. And hey, if any of you have any questions or challenges with divs, drop a comment below. I read every one and your question might even become the topic of my next video. All right, let's get started. Once you're on the DIVS home screen and you're logged in, you will go up here and you will see the different categories. We have home solicitations and RFQs. So let me show you how you can find the search page. So one way you can find it is to go to solicitations, and then you can click down here where it says dla request for quotation search. And that will take you to the search page. And the way I always do it is I just click on RFQS and it'll automatically take you there. Okay, this is where it gets a little bit tricky. So let me explain because I know I got stuck on this all the time. So they have different search categories. So we have. Right now it's on Innocent part number. I'm wanting to search on keyword. So you're going to go down here and click nomenclature. And that's what you're always going to use to search for your keywords. And my keyword is going to be bolt. Now, you would think you could just type your keyword and search and you would find it, but that's not the case. Let me show you. So if you just search on bolt, you're going to get an error. So let's go back. Now, here is something that used to always mess me up. I would forget to change the category back. So make sure you go back down to nomenclature. And then I'm going to type in bolt. And then I'm going to put an asterisk and dibs calls that the wildcards that's going to pick up on any solicitations that have the word bolt in them. And then I'm going to search. And now I get my search Results. So I've got about 1400 solicitations that have the word bolt in them. And then I can see the different solicitations here. They're organized by NSN part number. There's the nomenclature or the keyword, the technical documents. And remember to view those technical documents, you need to be registered in C folders. And we have a video for that. So be sure to check that out. And then if you click here, it will actually download the solicitation to your computer. And then if you're ready to quote on this solicitation, you will just click on that quote and it'll open it up. Quoting in dibs is fairly straightforward. We have a video on this too, but it's pretty quick. It should. Once you're used to quoting in divs, it should take you about 10 minutes to do that. All right, so let's go back. And I'm going to show you. So let's do this again. So we'll search by nomenclature bold with the asterisk search. And I'm going to grab one of these NSN numbers so I can show you this too. All right, so I'm going to grab this NSN number. I'm going to go back to the search. All right, so it automatically makes it always go back to the NSN number. So we're already on the right one. I'm going to paste that in. Now on this, you do not have to put any type of wild cards since it's just an exact value. So we'll just paste that in a sin number and search. And then it's going to have all of the solicitations that match that same NSN number. All right, let's go back again. So they have several different things that you can search on. You can search on FSC code, the solicitation number. And you might wonder why you want to do that. But let's say you bid on a solicitation and in a couple of days you want to see the status of that solicitation. So you could actually come back and type that solicitation number in here and then you can see if it was awarded or anything like that. You can search on purchase request. Nomenclature, like I said, is the keyword approved cage and approved part number. And then you can filter here. So this is sorted by NSN. You could show only automated IDCs. You could show only items with technical documents which you might want to do that just to make sure you have all of the information. You can search by the different set asides here, or you can just search by unrestricted. If you scroll down, you will see that you can just search for all recent RFQs that were posted in the last 15 days. So if we click that, you'll see all the different dates. So it's about 24 hours behind. So it's going to be yesterday's date. So if you click here, you can see all the ones posted on January 22nd. Something that really frustrates me. One of the things that really frustrates me about dibs is there's no export button and you can only view about 50 solicitations at a time. So it's really hard to, you know, build your pipeline out. So what I would suggest is instead of coming here and looking at all of them, I would really try to get very narrow keywords or search by NSN numbers so that it's. You're not. You don't have an overwhelming amount of solicitations to view. And that way you can pull those into Excel and be tracking those throughout your pipeline. If you were to click this zip file, it's actually going to download all of the solicitations for that date. So it would download all of the solicitations for January 22nd. So that's going to be 3,000 files, 3,000 solicitations that will be in that zip file for you. So if you have a need to do that, that could be helpful. All right. And then over here, this is where you can search by text. So if I were to type in bolt. And search, This is going to show me. So there's 1,627 records that have the word bolt in them. And this search is a little different. So it's actually going to show you where the word bolt is. So it's bolt T head. So if that's helpful for you, you can search that way as well. Thanks for watching. Be sure to grab my free guide in the description and check out my next video on how to read a dibs solicitation. It's packed with tips to help you succeed. See you there.
