How Effective (Not Just Efficient) – 3 Tips for Streamlining Your Business

You need to request a bid for some product or service essential to your business processes. The supplier that you look to award the bid to needs to not only provide you with the best possible solution, but also at a cost that is both reasonable and within your desired ROI for the project. In order to achieve these objectives, you need to evaluate multiple bids via a streamlined platform and come up with the winning bid that meets your cost requirement.

For many companies, this process is done by a team of vendor managers, cost analysts, or similar professionals within your organization whose job it is to review the supplier bids and determine who meets the requirements. This process can take excessive time and resources from your company at an unaffordable price. What is the solution? Using an automated platform to handle supplier bids, known as eSourcing, can provide you with at least three ways to help streamline your business.

eSourcing Allows You to Free up Staff

The process known as eSourcing is one that provides your business with a central point for analyzing information about suppliers, both current and potential ones. Maintaining a central system that is typically an online portal means that information goes into the portal and is analyzed by the system. Meanwhile, staff is freed up to complete other work in your organization. Freeing up staff from a process that an eSourcing system can handle allows you to extend your resources into other areas to help improve your bottom line.

eSourcing Allows You to Reduce Project Costs

An eSourcing platform like FlexRFP™ provides you with a way to eliminate the modern day version of paper and pencil (i.e. spreadsheets, Word documents, electronic messages, etc.) and replace it with a more streamlined way to gather and evaluate bid information. When you implement an electronic supplier management solution, you help make your supply and bid process work for you at a lower, more reasonable cost to your company.

eSourcing Allows You to Manage Supplier Information

A central portal full of supplier information can help you to better manage the relationships you have with your vendors. Depending on the input design of the eSourcing system, you can gather multiple data points on your suppliers and use this information to customize future bids. This reduces the bid period and the time before your project starts or orders are fulfilled.

If you are not already using an eSourcing solution for your supplier management, you should immediately investigate the options available to your company. These solutions, like FlexRFP™, should help you meet your costs, increase your ROI, and improve your supplier management process.