The message of delivering more for less is hugely important in business, but despite this, sourcing and tendering are two areas that are very often neglected.
So for all the people out there doing sourcing and tendering to drive best value for your organisation I salute you.
From my time spent over the last couple of years with Procurement departments, an area of concern in many organisations seems to be the manual process of sourcing and tendering. It is a nightmare for many, with high administrative time and effort and an overall lack of transparency in many cases.
So let’s dream together for a few paragraphs.
Imagine just for a moment . . .
You had a solution that provides a simple to use, flexible, collaborative and efficient method for electronically developing, publishing, accepting responses to, and evaluating all types of requests to suppliers such as Request For Quote, framework agreements, reverse auctions and complex structured tenders.
A Sourcing Event Manager that enabled each sourcing event to be indentified and managed as a project with user definable events with responsibilities being assigned. Providing progress visibility in the process at every stage for you and, if you like, the seller.
A solution that helps your organisation establish a standard process for each type of purchase with dated activities and milestones such as “Questionnaire Complete” or “Closing date for response”. A Milestone and Schedule Manager that outlines the timeline of each sourcing event and critical path dependencies within the process and will remind you or others in the form of alerts or reminders.
An RFx manager to automate your process by developing supplier requests expressing your need and then streamlining the process of publishing and evaluating responses and ultimately contract award.
The ability to design a collaborative questionnaire form allowing the specifications of need in grouped sections of questions to the supplier. The ability to store these in a library of supplier questionnaires that can then be cannibalised to speed up future processes.
Responses are managed by allowing suppliers to electronically submit responses along with any appropriate attachments according to the sourcing rules defined (for example, secured return) without the need for unwieldy paperwork.
The ability to automate scoring as per the defined scoring allocation and schemes specified in the questionnaire, with a process of subjective override by your panel with complete transparency and auditability of reasoning (for example, why the cheapest bid was not accepted).
A solution that streamlines the completion of the sourcing process by automatic acceptance and rejection communication with the suppliers, along with integration into your contract management solution.
There is no need to imagine, because this dream is in fact a reality!
The next step in the process is for Australian organisation to embrace a change for the better and recognise when their current way of doing things is not the most effective and practical way.
There are Best-in-Class solutions out there right now that eliminate labour-intensive procedures, eliminate human error and provide complete transparency.
