While companies have increasingly moved their workforces out of the office and into remote locations, with online meetings and enterprise software to manage operations, there’s still one function for which many companies require in-person – and often manual – participation.
Procurement processes have continued to be managed by hand, using complicated, hard-to-track spreadsheets, cabinets and rooms full of files, and traditional, formal solicitations and RFQs sent out in the mail or in traditional advertising.
Add in-person pre-bid meetings, bid evaluations, and bid award meetings, and many companies are still doing procurement the same way they did before the age of the internet.
But these processes are tedious and time consuming, wasting precious resources and employees who could be adding more value to your business operations.
Electronic procurement solutions (e-procurement) like the PB System™ from PlanetBids streamlines your procurement processes, allowing you to eliminate those spreadsheets and more easily track bids from solicitation to award, ensuring transparent processes and reducing costs associated with paper, transportation, time, storage, meetings, etc.
With PlanetBids, you can allow vendors to register within the system and choose the types of solicitations they’re interested in bidding on, so they’ll receive automatic notifications whenever a relevant new RFP or RFQ is issued and indicate their interest. No more sending out individual letters or emails or notifying potential vendors via newspaper and wondering which bidders will respond.
PlanetBids also notifies bidders when a new bid item or addendum is added, allowing you to require acknowledgement of the notification to ensure that bidders are working off the latest update and eliminating non-responsive bids. This function also protects you from vendor protests by providing a digital "paper trail" of all communication to reference later.
Read more about how PlanetBids is helping agencies reach their sustainability goals.
Speed up your solicitation and bidding process by knowing who exactly will be bidding and where they are in the process, and eliminate the need to schedule in-person pre-bid, bid review, or award meetings. Give your evaluators the confidentiality they need to evaluate the bid confidently, with specific metrics that turn the bid review process from subjective to objective, ensuring you’re always going with the best bid with the most value while maintaining transparency for the public when necessary.
Requests for records, insurance reviews, and any other records from previous bids are easily retrieved, without the need for rooms full of heavy, expensive filing cabinets stuffed with old paperwork. Simply search for what you need in the e-procurement system and send it over quickly. No Xerox machine needed.
Give your procurement staff the freedom to focus on strategic goals and build standard, repeatable processes that streamline your procurement operations and save you money. eProcurement solutions like the one from PlanetBids help you reduce risks, drive efficiency, expand vendor reach, and unlock savings.
Ready to transform your procurement operations with a cloud-based solution for any budget? Schedule a chat with our procurement experts.