- Tell us about your background?
I have been in supply chain and procurement for over 15years. I have worked in various industries such as retail, manufacturing, tech, real estate, and have always served in supply chain and procurement functions. I have firsthand experience with all the challenges and opportunities of this profession.
- Please tell us about PowerRFP?
PowerRFP is a procurement project management tool designed to support buyers in leading competitive bidding projects. The competitive bidding process is a complex task. It often involves a lot of documents, information, and communication to change hands between multiple sellers and the buyer. And the more projects a buyer is responsible for, the messier all the information could get.
PowerRFP allows buyers to centrally distribute, collect, organize, and archive all competitive bidding information and proposals in one place. Our built-in evaluation tool helps project owners make informed decisions.
- What made you decide to create PowerRFP?
I have been working in the procurement world for a long time. I have firsthand experience with the overwhelming responsibilities of a procurement manager – multiple projects taking place at the same time, an overwhelming amount of information rolling in, they all arrive at a different time and across various formats, tight deadlines.
While some procurement teams are lucky enough to adopt a sophisticated procurement application that can easily cost over $100,000 per year these are mainly larger enterprises; most procurement teams do not have that kind of resource. Owners and Sr. Managements of their business are often eager to invest toward the sales side but reluctant to put resources toward improving the procurement side. So most teams are still operating with antiquated methods.
We want to make procurement technology more accessible to these teams. We introduced a Professional Level of PowerRFP to support individual buyers conducting or her set of RF-x projects. We kept the application simple but effective. It solves the key pain point of a busy procurement environment – the distribution, collection, and organization of project information in one place.
We made our Professional Level free for all buyers. And we intend to keep it that way. We are committed to supporting the procurement and supply chain community.
- Wow, that is great. However, people will ask “There must be a catch. Nothing is FREE”
There is no catch. We are here to support the supply chain and procurement community by making our technology accessible to all. Our Professional Level tool is free for all buyers to use and we intend to keep it free.
We made this tool simple and effective. It took us a lot of work to build it. But now that it is built, it is quite affordable to keep it running; and this allows us to make it available for free to all the buyers.
- Who should be using your application? Who is your target audience?
The people we aim to support are Small to medium business with a small procurement team or single manager in charge of multiple procurements projects at any given time. They are busy, they may be overwhelmed with a large number of projects – a lot of tactical RFP/RFQ’s, but they still want to do things well and do things right. This is where PowerRFP can really bring them value. Our software will ensure best practices are always followed and all proposals and related information is streamlined and organized.
- So how does PowerRFP make money? How do you keep the lights on?
When buyers use PowerRFP to conduct bidding projects, they use our application to invite sellers to provide quotes and proposals. When sellers receive the invite, they get to review each opportunity before submitting quotes and proposals. Each month, a seller is given a batch of free submissions tokens to submit quotes and proposals on opportunities they want to go after. However, if a seller used up their monthly free submissions, but still has a lot of good RFP opportunities that they want to go after, the seller can still go after these opportunities with the pay-per-submission option.
The limited free submissions and pay-per-submission feature create scarcity and cost that help filter for better qualities proposals.
For the power sellers who receive a lot of opportunity invites and like to go after all the leads, we have seller membership programs that allow for unlimited submission.
- You are a new company, the customers will be asking if their data is secure.
We partner with Google firebase to provide backend infrastructure for PowerRFP. Rest sure, all project information will be secure.
- So what other plans does PowerRFP have in store for the future?
We plan to continue to improve and polish the current version of PowerRFP – Professional, and we plan to keep it free. I do believe for a lot of individual buyers, the Professional level will be perfectly useful for their needs.
I am also excited about our coming introduction of PowerRFP – Manager Level. This tier will have all the great collaboration features that are perfect for a cross-function team. I am very excited about this one.
And later on, we will also be introducing PowerRFP – Enterprise Level, aimed at a procurement team environment.
End of Interview