A disjointed procurement management process can lead to procurement workflow bottlenecks.  The manual management of contracts, vendors, purchase orders and bids can be challenging and ineffective.  Processes that involve paying per solicitation can grow expensive.  Don’t waste time, resources, and opportunities with a decentralised and inefficient procurement process.  Leverage leading eProcurement software for procurement management success ‘from cradle to grave’.

Request wizard and procurement workflow

The life of the procurement workflow starts with requests.  Trusted procurement software offers a diverse pool of request options.  Procurement teams complete a standard request form which triggers a review process that determines if the request necessitates a bid process or if an existing contract can be leveraged instead.  Reliable source-to-contract management software also offers an intelligent request wizard.  This innovative tool helps you and your users quickly answer a series of dynamic questions to decide on the type of RFx to be generated.

You then draft a request record, which can be edited and reviewed throughout the completion of designated workflow tasks.  Next, the user assigned to review budgets is notified and once the review is completed, additional bid requirements are gathered.  Finally, you can prepare to formalise your bid or bids.

Templated request generation and online bid advertisement

Leading-edge procurement management software can help organisations generate timely, formal and comprehensive request documents.  With the ability to merge record request data with clauses and templates within a pre-approved library, your procurement teams can oversee versions and manage templates for rapid document generation and convenient export as standard file formats.

After a proposal document is formalised, bids can be advertised publicly or by invite-only – directly from their procurement and contract management software system.  Seamless integration between contract management software and a bid listing service fosters healthy competition between vendors.  Consequently, buying organisations can get greater value from contract awards, and vendors can connect easily with relevant buying organisations.

The ability to change clauses with the help of a pre-approved clause library and simple bid advertisement can expedite request creation and vendor selection.

Convenient Q&A portal for potential vendors

After you’ve written a request and advertised your bid, prospective vendors can ask pertinent questions.  Useful question and answer tools provided by a trusted procurement platform can aid organisations in remaining on the same wavelength as vendor prospects.

Due dates for questions and answers can be established so that vendors are only allowed to submit questions within the time frame that fits the needs of the buying organization advertising the bid.  When that pre-decided date has passed, the system will no longer accept vendor responses.

Additionally, users can receive alerts when a question is posted, along with warnings when the due dates for questions and answers are near.  Organizations are also afforded options for how they respond to bidders.  Questions can be responded to one-by-one or via a spreadsheet that is made publicly available for vendors.

Easy vendor rating and scoring

Vendor response ratings and scorecards with reputable eProcurement software platforms can keep organisations confident that they’re selecting the supplier most aligned with their needs.  Bid rating weight control permits you to consider specific criteria more strongly for vendor responses over other criteria when scoring bids.  Accessible bid tabulation reports can be help you incorporate pricing and scoring line items for a rapid overview of bids.

Simplified vendor awards

Cutting-edge source-to-contract management software offer line item auctioning tools, which helps you offer specific bidding for individual items.  This functionality can be quite helpful for bid processes that let organisations award various vendors for different facets of a bid.

Bids can also be parsed out, which means that organisations can emphasise certain items, provide a space for vendors to choose items and offer their price, and capture all the specification details.

When you make your selection, your system can send an email directly to your supplier of choice, via the sourcing record page.  The use of a pre-approved email template can speed up this award notification process.  Furthermore, you can use the functionality to send emails to update the other interested parties, and thank them for their interest and participation in the process.

Rapid contract creation

After the award and award notification processes are completed, you can start managing the contract lifecycle.  You can create a new record within the eProcurement software system – or the sourcing record can be synced with an already-existing contract record – easily via the sourcing record that the you’ve been handling throughout the process.

For new contract record creation, contract management AI enables you to import contracts to your software system.  They can leverage easy-to-use data extraction features that intelligently categorise and map data, so that manual data entry is no longer required.  This accelerates the import of contract key dates, data, and clauses – giving you the visibility to compare, search, report and categorise contracts, risk and risk exposure.

Once a contract is linked or created, you can follow your typical contract lifecycle management procedures.

A centralised solution for procurement challenges

The tools mentioned above can help businesses like yours solve widespread procurement challenges, such as:

• routine task management, vendor administration, contract negotiation and vendor performance analysis
• spend analysis, including vendor invoicing, budgets, contract amounts, purchase control, payment processing, and fiscal year spend tracking and management
• restructuring operations involving automated contract workflow, vendor and supplier relationship management enhancements and improved overall procurement analytics
• meeting (and exceeding) expectations relating to vendor value improvement, supplier obligation fulfillment, contract benefits realisation, timely and data-driven contract management decisions and proper contract workflow escalation for matters such as disagreements, disputes and errors.

Enjoy beginning-to-end procurement…

Now that you know how to successfully use a leading procurement solution that covers your contract management needs from start to finish, it’s time to implement a comprehensive source-to-contract management solution. We recommend Contract Insight®. Its widely-acclaimed, web-based, secure, and centralised contract management, eProcurement, eSourcing and purchasing software has been hailed as a pioneering platform by a vast array of organisations within the public and private sectors over the past 20+ years. Used by many Fortune 500 companies, Contract Insight gives you real time visibility into your contracts.

For more information, contact John O’Brien, CEO at Four Business Solutions, global business consultants and software integrators providing business processes improvements in Finance, Supply Chain and Operations, across a broad range of industries.