Streamline and Optimize Bid Management with PlanetBids

or public agency procurement teams, managing bids can be a challenging process. From creating bid solicitations and specifications to tracking vendor submissions and ensuring compliance, each step demands time, coordination, and accuracy.

Software solutions for eProcurement can help – but they’re not all built the same. Whether you're using an eProcurement system now, have researched some but don’t know what to choose, or you’re just starting out in your eProcurement journey, PlanetBids is here to show you that adopting new software doesn’t have to be a pain.

In fact, streamlining your bid management processes can be quick and painless, helping you become more efficient and more effective so that you can stay organized from start to finish, with less busy work and more time for the important stuff.

How PlanetBids Stands Out in the eProcurement World

PlanetBids isn’t just another software company. For more than two decades, we’ve been helping public procurement teams in California create more effective bid solicitations, manage compliance, communicate with vendors, and award more competitive bids with our online portal for bid letting and submissions. In fact, the PlanetBids system was designed and built by former procurement professionals specifically to address the challenges faced by public agencies in the most highly regulated state in the U.S. And if we can streamline procurement in California, the land of red tape, we can help your agency too.

We don’t just offer “features” or “functions.” Our intuitive, easy-to-use system and highly rated, US-based support team are dedicated to helping make procurement easier for you and for your vendors. Here’s how we do it:

The PB System™ from PlanetBids: Streamlining Bid Management

01

Centralized Dashboard of Procurement Activities

A streamlined approach to bid management helps you speed up the creation and issuance of bid requests, monitor all submissions in real time, and evaluate formal and informal bids in one location. With an average 50% reduction in time spent creating and soliciting bids, the PB System helps you manage all procurement activities in one place, with robust ad-hoc reporting and analysis.

02

Create and Manage Bids Easily

Bid Management allows you to create new bid documents from scratch or from templates in the PB System to speed up each new solicitation, then send notifications to all registered vendors of a new bid opportunity with the push of a button. No more sending out media notifications or making individual phone calls or emails. For open bids, you can view all participating vendors and communication in one place and control who has access to bid results.

03

Simple, User-Friendly Vendor Portal

Your registered vendors will get an automatic email notification whenever a new solicitation is released, and they can open, review, and print bid details right in the portal. They can also ask questions and submit all required documentation, including the final bids. And you can rest assured that submissions are secure with locked-box encryption until the bid opening.

Meanwhile, your agency can control how much information is included in each solicitation, get notified of incomplete or non-bids, and get bid-specific reports regarding participation, classification, and cost savings within the Bid Management screen. (Comprehensive pre-built reporting can also be found in the Reports hub for deeper data analysis.)

04

Collaborative Evaluation

Your evaluating team can seamlessly and transparently score and award both formal and informal bids, including bids with multiple stakeholders involved, by simply checking the bid against pre-defined and objective evaluation criteria like technical skills, presentations, cost, timeline, and more. PlanetBids gives your evaluators the ability to score collaboratively or siloed and achieve consensus with proposal strength and weakness reporting, ensuring fairness and transparency.

05

Better Compliance Tracking

For public agencies, compliance is non-negotiable. PlanetBids tracks all documentation, certification, and insurance requirements in one place, ensuring that each vendor meets legal and regulatory standards. It also keeps a clear audit trail of every step in the bid process, documenting who made each decision and why. 

If this is a lot of information, we can break it down even more for you. Just reach out to our awesome PlanetBids crew to see how we can help you streamline bid management.

Where PlanetBids Shines: An Answer to Each of Your Pain Points

All eProcurement solutions claim to help you speed up your operations and report better. But what really makes PlanetBids different? It’s the way we address your problems – simply, and head-on. Let’s check it out.

PROBLEM #1

Information Overload – So Many Bids, So Little Time

You’re bidding out multiple projects at once, all in different stages of their lifecycle. One is being awarded tomorrow, another is in the Q&A stage, a third is just being released, while yet another is coming down the pipe next month and is in the building phase. With all those different timelines, deadlines, documents, and vendors, how can you possibly keep track?

• Why It’s a Problem: Whether you’re a one-man procurement powerhouse or a team working together for a huge agency, it’s hard to stay on the same page with just a few outstanding projects. The more you add, the bigger the confusion can grow. And with documents scattered across multiple desks or computer folders and timelines on random calendars, it’s easy to miss a letting, misplace a document, or send an incomplete response.
• How PlanetBids Fixes It: Bid Management centralizes all your upcoming, open, closed, and awarded bids in one intuitive dashboard, showing you project stages, upcoming due dates, missing information, vendor responses, and performance metrics to get a better understanding of how your projects are running.

Every morning, when you log in, you’ll see a list of the day’s to-dos and due dates, so you can immediately hop into the most important work first thing or check out the calendar to see what’s upcoming.

PROBLEM #2

Creating & Managing Bids is a Drain

How much time does your team spend creating new bids from scratch or copying old bids and erasing irrelevant information to replace it with new info? How many filing cabinets have you filled with paper that must be kept for a certain number of years, only to throw it away when that time passes?

• Why It’s a Problem: The time spent on tedious, manual processes and busy work stops your team from being able to strategize new ways to create value for your stakeholders. You don’t have time to look back on previous projects or vendors and evaluate performance or identify ways to improve.
• How PlanetBids Fixes It: Bid Management creates a streamlined approach to help you speed up the creation and issuance of bid requests. You can create a bid on the fly, build new templates from scratch, or upload your existing templates into the system, saving you time spent researching and collecting information. Plus, you get full access to all PlanetBids’ member agency bids nationwide in our bid spec library to see how other purchasing agencies have worded their bids, specifications, and scopes of work and use them as a basis for your own templates, or even piggy-back off another agency’s bid to find new partners.

Once a bid is released, you can view all your vendors, and their responses, in one place, see and answer submitted questions, review communication history, upload addenda, and control award release notifications, all in one central location. It’s the easiest way to manage multiple bids at once without losing an email or misplacing a document.

PROBLEM #3

Vendor Communication is All Over the Place

How many emails are in your inbox right now? Have they all been read? Any with “urgent” labels on them? When you’re handling millions of public dollars in contract opportunities each year, you can’t afford to miss a single message. But paper-based lettings and in-person bid submissions don’t give you any way to control the flow of communication.

• Why It’s a Problem: When your team is tasked with answering emails, returning missed calls, and playing telephone with important information, you can’t be sure that all questions have been seen and responded to, or that all addenda is received by all parties. This leaves you open to bid protests, incomplete submissions or no-bids, and non-competitive responses that cost you valuable time and money.
• How PlanetBids Fixes It: With an easy-to-use vendor portal, your registered partners get automatic notifications of new bid opportunities whenever they’re posted. They can view and download lettings immediately, submit any required certifications or documentation, ask questions and view all Q&A with other vendors, and receive notifications of changes, all in the same portal. You’ll never miss a question or clarification, and you’ll have proof that addenda were received in case of any protest, ensuring a fair and transparent process for all vendors and the public.

PROBLEM #4

Evaluations are Subjective and Inconsistent

Depending on your agency, your procurement team might be evaluating and awarding contracts, or another department may be tasked with the evaluation and selection process. Either way, when public funds are on the line, it’s important to have clear, consistent guidelines as to what criteria will determine the winning bid.

• Why It’s a Problem: When evaluators aren’t involved in the solicitation creation process, they may not understand exactly what the agency is looking for in a project or have insight into the quality of work of a particular vendor. They might judge a bid based on cost when timeline is more important or place a higher priority on delivery deadline when sustainability is being pushed by the agency or a governing body.
• How PlanetBids Fixes It: With Bid Management and the Project Evaluation add on, you can create a standard scoring metric across all projects or assign a specific metric to each project. Your evaluators can work together on comparing bids to the rubric, or you can silo them to ensure that each evaluation is completely independent. Proposal strength and weakness rating reports help ensure that each submission is judged fairly and that each contract is awarded to the most competitive bidder, so you never have to worry about bid protests or corruption claims. In fact, PlanetBids member agencies have never had a valid bid protest against the software system.

PROBLEM #5

Weak Spots are Popping Up in Compliance

If you’re a public agency using public funds, chances are extremely high that you must meet some sort of regulatory standard or comply with some sort of statute in every project. But with tons of vendors and suppliers, multiple projects running at once, and several people involved in each job, compliance is more like a juggling act than a streamlined process.

• Why It’s a Problem: Failure to have proof of vendor certifications or insurance on file can leave you at risk for a ton of issues –- from fines and delays to shutdowns or safety risks. And if, heaven forbid, something goes wrong on a job site and you can’t prove compliance, you’ve opened your agency up to the risk of litigation as well.
• How PlanetBids Fixes It: With the vendor portal, all necessary documentation required from your suppliers can be submitted and tracked right through the PB System, so you never have to worry about missing an email attachment or misplacing a paper copy. Vendors can be notified of missing documents when submitting their bids, and your team can be notified whenever a certificate is missing or expiring. Your agency gets a clear audit trail of every step in the bid process, ensuring compliance and providing a complete record in case of questions or audits.

What Makes PlanetBids Stand Out from the Competition

While the PB System™ helps public agencies reduce administrative burden, increase bid participation, and ensure compliance, what truly sets us apart is PlanetBids easy, no-fuss implementation and responsive customer support team.

We know making a software purchase is no small feat for a government agency, so we don’t want to make you wait forever to get your software system up and running once you finally get approval. That’s why we promise implementation in days, not months, for your agency – and even sooner for your vendors. Once you’ve signed your contract, we’ll send you a few documents to identify users and required permissions, ask vendor registration questions and determine category codes, settings preferences, and vendor lists.

Then, we’ll start setting up your agency account with all your specifications and requirements and turn on your vendor profile. We’ll notify all vendors currently registered with other agencies in our network, as well as any agencies you want to reach out to, while your team goes through user training. This training can take as little as one day for Bid Management before your users are up and running in the system, ready to create and release bids.

Once you’re launched, our dedicated, U.S.-based support and maintenance team is readily available to answer any questions, give you continuous insights into effectively using the PB System, and let you know of any improvements in the software. In fact, we think it’s our dedicated people who make PlanetBids the best eProcurement solution in the business.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can PlanetBids help me create bids faster?

A: Absolutely! With templates and the bid spec library, you never have to start from scratch again when creating a new bid.

Q: Can PlanetBids help me manage vendors better?

A: Of course. Not only can the Bid Management system help you manage vendor communications, see all potential bidders and their statuses, and identify any missing documentation, but we have a whole separate module dedicated to Vendor Management as well!

Q: Will PlanetBids save time for my team?

A: You bet. With streamlined bid creation, centralized management, and easy reporting, our clients save an average of 50% in the bid creation and solicitation process using the PB System.

Q: What reports can I see in the PB System?

A: You can customize your performance metrics and timeframes to track what matters most to you, including number of portal visits, number of vendor registrations and logins, document downloads, and number of bid responses submitted. Job-specific reports include project participation, ethnicity/gender, classification, cost savings, while the Reports tab allows you to select from more than two dozen different pre-built reports.

Q: Are bid submissions in PlanetBIds’ vendor portal secure?

A: Absolutely. We prioritize data protection, so all bid information is submitted in a sealed, encrypted, digital locked box via a secure connection using industry-standard 256-bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificates. Each agency always has complete control over the amount of information released to the public, and secure downloading of private documentation meets Homeland Security requirements for distribution. All PlanetBids vendor and agency data is hosted by Amazon Web Services in the most secure and operational cloud infrastructure available.

Q: How long does it take to get up and running?

A: In most cases, new PlanetBids user agencies can be implemented and trained in just a few days, with vendors active in your system by the time your training is complete. Vendor Management and Bid Management module training take one day each, while other modules take even less time. We handle the configuration based on your specifications and requirements, with minimal lift from your IT department.

The Bid Management system from PlanetBids is a powerful way to improve bid management by automating repetitive tasks, centralizing information, and providing clear communication with vendors. This makes the bid process faster, more transparent, and easier to manage from start to finish. By leveraging the PB System™, procurement teams can reduce the administrative burden, increase bid participation, and ensure that every step aligns with compliance and accountability standards.

Tired of doing things the hard way and ready to get started with new, streamlined processes? Contact Us!