With email as one of the most common methods of tendering and interacting with suppliers, most companies struggle even to answer these questions let alone identify changes they could make to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
Thankfully, this is where a technology platform like DeepStream can help.
Allow for structured but flexible responses
It’s important to build a clear and concise process for tendering, but many platforms are too prescriptive about exactly what’s involved.
When users are forced to work in a way which feels unnatural, we see this leads to abandonment in favour of our old friend email (with its many associated risks).
At DeepStream, we know everyone does procurement differently (even within the same company) and we’ve built the platform with this in mind – tenders can involve:
- 1 stage and deadline vs many
- a single document vs tens or hundreds
- complex, structured data vs free exchange of messages
- and so on...
The benefit of a more open and flexible product is that it can adapt to support everything from the highly rigid, process-driven approaches to something much looser or ad hoc, and everything in between.
Don’t repeat yourself
Buyers should avoid wasting time asking for the same information from their suppliers as much as possible, but this still happens way too often in reality.
In DeepStream, supplier pre-qualification data and documents can be saved once, kept up-to-date in a single, secure location where they can be easily published and shared.
Instead of asking for an answer or a document again and again, imagine having the power to just go and find what you need directly – freeing up everyone’s time to deal with more important things.
Let tech do the grunt work
No one dreams of spending their days downloading and collating email attachments, or endlessly copy-pasting from one spreadsheet to another.
These aren’t tasks which anyone will thank you for. They’re clearly necessary, but are they the best use of your time and valuable expertise?
Build a tender in DeepStream and it will support you in structuring the request exactly how you choose with flexible modules like line items, document exchanges and vessel pricing.
When suppliers come back to submit their bids, their data will be validated and collated by default so you can start comparing and evaluating sooner, without the grunt work.
Free from the need to scan tens of emails, download hundreds of attachments, and negotiate excel reformatting nightmares, imagine what you could do with all that extra time?
Be data driven
When tenders are run manually, it’s almost impossible to thoroughly consider how the process was run and, as a result, it’s very hard to understand how to improve efficiency.
Say you want to know the average time it took each supplier to submit their bid so you can understand how straightforward it was?
Fancy trying to collate tens of emails and documents, or sending out surveys and hoping for an accurate response? How about doing all that consistently across your team and across all procurement activity? It doesn’t sound like a nice prospect.
When you move the tender process away from opaque, unstructured emails you not only reduce compliance risks and improve the overall experience, you open up huge new possibilities for benchmarking and tracking data.
In DeepStream, buyers get an email at the close of every bid submission deadline giving an overview of how things went. This covers supplier statuses, interactions, structure, your team’s time involvement and more.
With access to data as a byproduct of simply using what’s already a great product and much better experience, companies who use DeepStream are in the best position to understand how they work and identify improvements, then test them and measure the benefits.
What do you need to be more efficient?
Understanding what people like you need to work most effectively is core to the DeepStream ethos. We’re well placed to listen, learn, and deliver – quickly.
If you could ask any question about your own process to improve your understanding, what would that question be?
Getting an answer is probably more achievable than you think.
