When PlanetBids CEO Dave DiGiacomo attended the 2024 Foundations for California Community Colleges Purchasing Conference in April, he was struck by a feeling that he’d heard this content before.
Cal Poly University Chief Procurement Officer Darin Matthews’ keynote, titled “Let’s Bring It! How to Raise the Bar on Sustainable Procurement” felt almost like it was a direct advertisement for PlanetBids’ eProcurement software system – despite never mentioning PlanetBids by name.
“He literally went through every single component of our system,” DiGiacomo said. “How do you choose qualified buyers? How do you choose local buyers? How do you choose from the sustainable manufacturers that are out there? I asked if he’d heard of PlanetBids before, and he said no, but that what we do was exactly what he was discussing.”
Aside from the obvious benefits of saving paper by moving bid solicitations and responses online, eProcurement systems – like the PB System™ from PlanetBids – can help companies make more sustainable vendor and subcontractor decisions, pushing them toward a world with more eco-friendly projects.
READ MORE: PlanetBids Helps Agencies Build Eco-Friendly Procurement Processes
“When you’re looking at long-term sustainability, building your vendor database and maintaining that all in one place with all your prequalifications ready to tap into that vendor network, is easy and clear cut, straight to the point,” DiGiacomo said. “That’s what our system does. The qualifications for every single one of these bids are in one place, so you’re able to just harvest the people that meet those qualifications if you are looking to fill a certain percentage for a minority run businesses or maybe an environmentally friendly business. That can be managed in our system, which is unique in the industry.”
PlanetBids provides agencies with a wider vendor network to choose from, helping to fit a specific need or an accountability threshold so that the agency can make more eco-friendly purchasing decisions in addition to viewing general criteria such as lowest price.
Those higher response rates, coupled with the greater ability to choose, provide agencies with a frictionless process that can drive down costs as well, saving taxpayer dollars.
“Having more vendors in the mix will actually create more competition,” DiGiacomo said. “Opening up to local vendors and allowing them to bid on components of the bid instead of awarding the total bid all to one vendor – if you break it down and have local vendors bid on smaller portions, you will have a better result at the end of the day and can actually save money.”
PlanetBids’ system does not exclude specific types of vendors or sway agencies from using a specific vendor. Rather, the goal is to promote more vendors to join your agency’s “universe” so that you can make the best purchasing decisions possible and select the perfect mix for each bid.
“We make it a very frictionless process between vendors and our agency clients,” DiGiacomo said. “We promote both big and small vendors to join. There are furniture vendors that only sell recyclable or landfill-friendly furniture, for example. How do we get those into the mix? We’re a platform that organizes things for you, and the more information you put in, the better the results are going to be for you.”
Of course, in addition to helping you make better procurement decisions, PlanetBids also helps you save trees and reduce your carbon footprint by allowing your agency employees to work from anywhere and by moving bid openings online.
LEARN MORE: Check out our PB System™ now.
Moving your procurement operations online helps eliminate the tedious, day-to-day manual processes and cumbersome file keeping of the past, promotes more efficient agency-vendor communication, creates more transparency, and improves regulatory compliance.
“You don’t have to be in one place anymore,” DiGiacomo said. “Everything we do within our system allows you to work electronically, from anywhere in the world, so we’re not increasing the carbon footprint to do the things that are just everyday business nowadays. We’re making it easier while creating higher responses, with a frictionless process that drives costs down as well.”
Want to learn more about how a system built by procurement experts for procurement teams – like the one from PlanetBids – can help your team create a more sustainable procurement operation while saving on time and costs?
Reach out to our team today to schedule a chat.
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