When you’re in need of a new supplier, it means it’s time to open a brand-new tender.
However, managing this without tendering software, or a tender management system, you’re likely to encounter several obstacles. This includes trying to manage vast quantities of supplier responses. Without a tendering system, this means juggling numerous spreadsheets and having little oversight across your project.
Those who have tried to run tenders with these manual systems will be aware of the challenges this can pose.
What is Tendering Software?
Tendering Software, or Tender Management Software, is an electronic system which allows you to run tenders from one location.
Without using a tender management system, your tender management processes could be in danger of becoming unmanageable, making it difficult to trust whether you have truly selected the best supplier for the job.
By implementing tendering software, you gain oversight across your selection process and the ability to sufficiently audit your processes. This results in confidence that you have selected the best supplier for the job.
Challenges posed without a Tender Management System:
No Standardisation
Without tendering software, your respondents could send across tender answers in the format that suits them best, meaning you risk tender responses appearing in different formats.
This results in copious amounts of rekeying and data transfer to analyse the data, which results in hours of unnecessary work that could be better spent elsewhere. Not to mention that this is an incredibly tedious task for those involved.
Not only does this compromise the integrity of the data provided, but it massively bloats the capacity of your workforce.
Therefore, the key to an efficient operating team is software.
No Connection with Onboarding Process
Supplier selection and onboarding are two different processes with a glaring number of similarities.
Once a supplier is selected, they need to be onboarded, which involves collecting large amounts of information about the supplier.
This can involve transferring information collected during the tender stage to your company’s supplier onboarding system manually.
This is a great deal of time and effort on a task that is ultimately repetitive administration.
Time-intensive Procedures
A tender can be a herculean effort to organise, and it doesn’t make it easier when it seems that suppliers aren’t going to meet the deadline. This ultimately lowers your pool of suppliers to choose from.
However, chasing suppliers to remind them of the tender deadline, and fill in the missing information that they require is also a time-consuming task. Missed deadlines can extend and bloat your procurement cycles.
Difficulty Comparing Suppliers
If all tender participants send their answers across in spreadsheets, it can be difficult to get a sense of who is truly the right supplier for the job.
There’s no oversight or place to compare suppliers directly, and any scoring system must be entirely manually set-up or implemented. This once again bloats the workloads of your team on a task that is repetitive and uninteresting.
Also, without a direct system of scoring and comparison, it’s difficult to assess that you have selected the right supplier.
About ARCUS® eRFX
Our clients manage their tenders through ARCUS® eRFX, our cloud-based supplier selection tool. ARCUS® eRFX allows users to run eRFX from one centralised location, that’s easily accessible, and intuitive for suppliers to use.
Suppliers complete the tenders through configurable questionnaires in the system directly, with tiered question-branching. Instead of needing to complete every question, suppliers only need to complete any relevant questions based on their answers.
When used with ARCUS® Supplier Information Management (SIM), our supplier onboarding software, answers given during the tender stage, are auto-populated during the onboarding stage through our bi-directional data transferral feature. Similarly, if the tender is re-opened at a later stage, the supplier eRFX answers are auto-populated with information from the supplier record in ARCUS® SIM.
Automated reminders save your procurement team from chasing suppliers to complete the eRFX in-time, and in-software communication features mean that suppliers can communicate with the buying company directly.
Through weighted scoring functionality, and side-by-side comparison, it’s much easier to determine which supplier best meets your needs.
To learn more about our tendering software, book a consultation with a member of the team to discover how it can help you.
