Many teams have significant technology gaps that prevent them from meeting this challenge. These gaps force teams to rely on manual and hard-copy processes that consume resources and negatively impact their ability to make better supplier selections.
Solving these technology gaps is more critical now than ever before. Here are three of the key procurement technology gaps you need to address:
1) Still using paper or basic bid tools.
If there is a single technology priority, it needs to be replacing your paper submissions and basic bid tools. Dealing with high volumes of paper or difficult bidding tools can consume much of your team’s time and resources, and it can also damage the competitiveness of your suppliers.
Without an intuitive and easy way for suppliers to participate in your bids or RFx online, your competitive supplier pool is significantly weakened. Eliminating hard-copy submissions and hard-to-use basic bidding portals helps attract more qualified suppliers - a critical objective when you consider that each additional supplier brought to the table results in 5-20% pricing spread.
2) Evaluation and scoring is done using Excel.
Your procurement decisions are too important to trust to a spreadsheet. Using Excel to capture scores, aggregate results, and make supplier decisions is time-consuming, limits your analysis abilities, and significantly increases the risk of errors or mistakes.
Today’s supplier competitiveness highlights the need for more highly-structured data and powerful evaluation: in fact, the scoring difference between your winning supplier and second place can be as little as 8.3% on average. You need to have the technology to easily optimize outcomes, proactively manage your evaluation process, and have the confidence that your decision is driving the best value.
3) Patchwork toolchains are a barrier to perfect compliance and auditability.
Without a streamlined platform, the evidence behind your decisions is scattered across email, pieces of paper, drop boxes, Excel-files, etc. This severely hampers your ability to quickly and easily maintain an audit trail and demonstrate full compliance. Internal audits and supplier debrief requests become a daunting and time-consuming task.
The best procurement technology delivers an air-tight audit trail automatically, capturing and recording all stakeholder activities, and giving you peace of mind knowing your decisions are fully justified and defendable.
Modern procurement teams need modern procurement technology, to eliminate time- consuming manual and paper-based processes and empower buyers to focus on what really matters: selecting better suppliers with certainty.
About the Author
Omar Salaymeh is the Director of Client Success at Bonfire, a leading next-generation competitive bidding and RFx platform. In his role, Omar's been directly involved with transforming and modernizing the procurement process at over 200 organizations across North America. Learn more at GoBonfire.com.