Written by: Amy Cornforth
Posted on: 09/07/21
Transforming Sourcing: Why you Need a Standardised Tender Process
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.
Why ARCUS® Source?
To learn more about our ARCUS® Source family of modules, have a look at the brochure.
If you don’t already have a standardised tender process in place, or you are still using paper-based systems, then you’ll recognise the following scenarios.
Large online requests for information provoke high response numbers, which result in a variety of answer formats, and 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. 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 if hundreds of your suppliers miss pieces of information, it quickly balloons into a monumental challenge.
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.
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 software solution, that centralises all tender management, and responses 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, eliminating 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, particularly environmental, social and governance data. A live link is established so that whenever the official data source is updated, so is the information within ARCUS® .
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 more about how ARCUS® eRFX can transform your tenders, then download the case study here, or contact us at Trade Interchange.
Blog updated in August 2024
Why ARCUS® Source?
To learn more about our ARCUS® Source family of modules, have a look at the brochure.