Product

• Supplier On-boarding Process

  

  The first logical step of any sourcing process is to pre-qualify your suppliers that you intend to use for procurement projects. ProcurementPal offers a simple and effective onboarding process to ensure all needed content is collected and stored within the online repository for both approved and prospective suppliers. Customers are able to tailor their onboarding process to the strategic needs of their business forming a repeatable and consistent method of pre-qualification. Our onboarding process ensures that customers are furnished with all the necessary documents and certificates from prospective suppliers in order to start trading together. Likewise, prospective suppliers are furnished with all the knowledge and values of the company that they are wishing to supply to. Our onboarding self-service portal allows prospective suppliers and customers to communicate only through this portal, so communication is easily tracked and structured in a controlled manner to streamline the process.

• RFQ Capability

  

  The RFQ process involves the customer creating a request for a specific material or service from prospective suppliers. The purpose of an RFQ is to invite a number of offers from suppliers in order to secure competition, and gather information about their value proposition; such as service, delivery time and lead time. An RFQ would normally be used for generic lower value purchasing, and when less formal approaches are made to suppliers. For higher value, and more formal approaches to suppliers, where the scope of works or specification is clearly defined, the customer can adopt and tailor the same process to suit both a Request for Tender (RFT) and Request for Proposal (RFP). The ProcurementPal RFQ process allows for both qualitative aspects; such as service and quality, and quantitative aspects; such as lead time and price to be evaluated together, and the user is able to structure the event to their requirements for their business. By creating these events in ProcurementPal, the process becomes centralized, allowing all communication and sharing of documentation to be stored into one repository. This allows users to compare supplier submission more efficiently and effectively, and allows the host to manage multiple supplier submissions at one time with less resource.

• E-Auctions

  

  E-auctions fundamentally solve the customer problem of negotiation with suppliers. Traditional methods of negotiation tend to take weeks to execute and don’t always leave you with the greatest value for your business. E-auctions execute quickly in real time and ensure that you get the optimum value from the market in the most efficient time possible. With e-auctions, bids are obtained from pre-qualified suppliers, and judged on pre-defined criteria to make decision making and evaluation simple to execute. ProcurementPal offers you multiple award scenarios to tailor the most suitable solution to your business. Such scenarios include reverse e-auctions for buying product, forward e-auctions for selling product, as well as e-auctions for when supplier competition is high or low. Whatever the requirement, ProcurementPal offers solutions that will suit your specific needs.

• Weighted RFQ’s / E-Auctions

  

  One of ProcurementPal’s distinct points of differentiation from our competition is our emphasis on other strategic aspects besides price. Negotiating of price is obviously important to remain competitive, but so are aspects like cash flow, service and lead time to mention a few. Not all sourcing decisions are price-driven and every buyer needs to also pay attention to other aspects of strategic importance. With ProcurementPal, users can customize their evaluation criteria by configuring weighting for the strategic aspects of importance. For example, if cash flow is important to your organization, ensure that it receives the right level of attention by making it a variable within your RFQ or auction (event). Then allow each supplier to submit a ‘payment term’ as well as ‘price’, and weight the importance accordingly. By following this process, the event becomes far more equitable and encourages flexibility and creativity in how your suppliers will bid. Once the suppliers bid, ProcurementPal optimises the speed of decision making through decision support, by automatically declaring who is leading or winning the event. With such a transparent process, there is much greater emphasis on compliance, and creates a far more auditable process for the procurement function.

• Configurable Questionnaires

  

  A configurable Questionnaire can be used for multiple purposes in ProcurementPal. Firstly it can be used as part of a Request for Information (RFI), which is required to obtain information about the supplier's products or solutions; their capability; details about a category, or market intelligence. They are normally used when the buyer lacks a certain understanding about this category or market and wishes to learn more about it before going through to an RFQ.

  Secondly, a configurable questionnaire can be used in conjunction with an RFQ or an e-auction. This allows the user to take into consideration any factors related to awarding a contract. For example, away from the variables that the supplier can ‘bid’ on such as such as payment, delivery terms and price, there may be other aspects that are also important. For instance, factors such as the supplier’s policies towards health & safety, environmental issues, or questions around the legal structure of the organization may be important. ProcurementPal configurable questionnaires are fully customizable to the customers needs to include any aspects of their choosing, and can be scored and weighted based on the organizations requirements.

• Document Sharing & Storage

  

  Whether your procurement process involves request for quotation, information, proposal or tender, the likelihood is that your sourcing project can be full of complex information in a variety of sources and locations. ProcurementPal allows the user to submit requests for documentation in a standardized format to all suppliers at the same time. Both customers and suppliers are permitted to upload and store documents and data for any event. Procurementpal then allows you to take control of this information and make sense of it, by accurately and conveniently storing and sharing it at your convenience in a central repository.

  ProcurementPal also offers functionality to store Documents (such as Ts & Cs) centrally, in order to be used repeatedly in events by including them by default at the users’ discretion, and thus optimizing the standardization and efficiency of event creation.

• Centralized Messaging Portal

  

  Again, during sourcing projects, there can be multiple communication methods from a variety of people or entities, and trying to keep up to date with the latest communication can be difficult. ProcurementPal offers the opportunity to centralize all communication into the event itself, whilst logging authors and timings. This ensures that all participating stakeholders are up to date with the latest communication about the event, and they no longer need to navigate through there personal emails or messaging services to stay connected to the project.

• Reporting & Analytics

  

  One of our biggest frustrations of our competitors was the inability to recognize the importance of analytics post-event for both customers and suppliers alike. With equitability in mind, ProcurementPal offers both the customer and supplier the opportunity to report on how they are performing on events. For example, from a customer perspective, you can see how much money has been saved, how many payments terms have improved, service lead times reduced. For suppliers, they gain a tremendous competitive intelligence on where business is won and lost by allowing them to understand their competitive position on the qualities that matter to their customers.