Leading a competitive bidding process can be painful. It all starts fine with sending your Request for Proposal (RFP) out to your suppliers one by one and then a lot of information starts coming in from various channels and formats. The process, commonly managed through numerous threads of emails with attachments of documents in Microsoft words and/or excel format, phone conversations, face-to-face meetings, and paper notes, makes all the information a challenge to sort through and organize. In the end, you are the one who is painfully sorting through all the information and trying to make sense of everything.
The competitive bidding process is generally considered as the formal practice for the acquisition of goods and services by companies, the government, and other organizations. The practice of formal RFP/RFQ/Tenderis a very crucial step towards achieving desirable outcomes and maximizing the Returns on Investment.
For many organizations, senior management is always motivated to invest toward improving sales. While they should have a strong emphasis on increasing sales, they often under-invest in improving procurement performance. This is especially true in small and medium-sized businesses where resources are usually limited. These procurement teams must resort to operate in an antiquated environment, i.e. interacting with each supplier one at a time then follow by long hours of sorting through the information. While good procurement teams do their best to maintain a good discipline in procurement practice; there is a lot of room for improvement.
As much as the business world strives to embrace automation, procurement is still an area in which manual processes dominate small to medium businesses. Overreliance on manual processes exposes the business to risks such as human error, miscommunication, and incomplete visibility over a business’ spending hence missed opportunities for cost savings.
There is good procurement software in the market that caters to competitive bidings initiatives, but they are all expensive. They all claim to support SMEs, but often come with 6-figure annual pricing.
Based on research, common reasons why businesses are reluctant to adopt procurement software are as follows:
- Lack of resources: After investing everything in sales operation, giving that team the latest toys and CRM software there is nothing left to improve the procurement side.
- Lack of supply chain knowledge by the Senior Management team: Rather than viewing supply chain/procurement as a resource to the business, they still see it as a cost center, so they are reluctant to put resources toward improving spending.
- Potential system conflict: Management concern that a new procurement system will not integrate with the existing ERP system and/or accounting system.
The road to optimize the procurement process can be rough, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. This is because the aforementioned challenges can be easily addressed by utilizing PowerRFP, a procurement project management tool that offers you an effective and convenient solution to streamline your competitive bidding process.
PowerRFP focuses on solving the main challenge of any competitive bidding initiative – keeping project information coordinated and organized. It allows users to digitally and centrally coordinate all competitive bidding requests with vendors, manage project updates, track all notes and communications by project, and collect all proposals and project information centrally in one place.
PowerRFP easily integrates into your existing business practice without any conflict with your existing ERP or accounting system. PowerRFP is also highly flexible when it comes to user adoption. It will bring immediate value to anyone who chose to utilize it without the need to convince the entire team to adopt it. This means that even though other team members of your team may insist on sticking to their antiquated methods, as long as you are willing to give PowerRFP a try, you will still get to enjoy the full capabilities of PowerRFP.
Best of all, unlike other expensive tools in the market, it is completely free for buyers and with no limitations to the number of projects.
PowerRFP will provide the following benefits to your organization:
- Better Coordination and Extremely Organized
More projects often lead to more proposals and more information to sort through. PowerRFP allows you to take on multiple projects while staying organized and maintain proper procurement practice. Use PowerRFP to centrally distribute, collect, and organize all project information to make sure both you and your vendors are always on the same page. All proposals and project responses from your vendors are centrally received and automatically organized for you in one place.
- Drive Performance
Manual coordination means you are restricted to the number of projects you can coordinate before information gets missed. PowerRFP helps you do more with less. Run more projects and at the same time let PowerRFP help you stay organized.
- Always a Clear Conversation
Ever mix-up communication between two different projects or send a message to the wrong vendor? PowerRFP’s In-Project Messenger feature will help keep all project communication clear and on topic. No more mixing up different project conversations.
Have an important announcement to make on a project? Broadcast-to-All function will allow you to easily inform all proponents at once.
Improved Data and Better Decisions
With a built-in tool for data analytics, PowerRFP automatically organizes all proposals into an evaluation grid for your analysis. Additional decision support tools, such as a proposal scorecard, are available to help you make an informed decision.
- Easy Archive
Have you ever had your boss out of the blue, request you to send him all the information on a project that was completed years ago? Just to make things more interesting, he comes to you 5 minutes before the end of the day and you are to provide the info as soon as possible. With PowerRFP you will never lose track of your information because all completed projects are archived. Past and present projects and review proposals, notes, and communications can easily be found in PowerRFP’s platform.
PowerRFP is simple and elegant. It focuses on solving the main issues of the competitive bidding process. It is created by procurement professionals for the procurement community. PowerRFP is free for all buyers and procurement professionals to conduct all procurement and sourcing projects.
Your business is a continuously improving and continuous problem-solving path. PowerRFP is the most effective tool to help take your company to the next level.