Managing a tender is tricky at the best of times. The bottom line is, they will always be chaotic to manage unless you adopt an efficient, standardised tender process. If you don’t have a standardised tender process in place, then you might find they are particularly difficult to manage.
Large online requests for information provoke high response numbers, which result in a variety of answer formats. This means there’s extra rekeying work for the sourcing team.
Additionally, without moving the tender information to a standardised template, you will find it difficult to compare and analyse the results.
Without being able to place the data into a standardised, viewable framework, it’s difficult to see a comprehensive overview of the options on-hand.
Therefore, it’s hard to assess whether you’ve selected the supplier which best fit the needs of the company. It becomes a challenge to truly assess suppliers and select the best option.
Furthermore, there’s always the possibility that suppliers will send responses with missing information, resulting in time spent chasing the supplier for the data they’ve skipped. This seems like a small task in isolation, but it can quickly balloon into a monumental challenge.
How can you enforce a standardised tender process?
The answer is to put an effective system in place. This saves time, energy and stress, not to mention the satisfaction of having absolute confidence in your tender result.
Our tender software, ARCUS® eRFX, allows you to implement a standardised tender process via a cloud-based solution. This centralises all tender management in one accessible location.
By collecting responses through configurable questionnaires, all suppliers must adhere to the correct tender format and can only submit responses once all questions are answered.
This eliminates the need to chase the suppliers for missing details.
This information is placed into a standardised framework to be compared and analysed with weighted scoring.
To increase confidence in your supplier data, ARCUS® uses it’s API functionality to bring information into the system directly from official data sources. ARCUS® utilises two-way data flow functionality, creating a seamless connection between tender management with eRFX, and supplier onboarding with ARCUS® Supplier Information Management (SIM).
Information collected during the tender stage is auto populated within your supplier information management system.
Similarly, when tenders are re-opened, information on your existing suppliers in SIM is auto populated in eRFX.
If you are interested in learning how ARCUS® eRFX can transform your tenders, download the case study here.