Identifying quality vendors for the ongoing procurement need at right price is Holy Grail for any procurement team. Many procurement professionals attest that RFPs act as backbone in direct material sourcing and effective supplier management. Strategic procurement initiatives such as target savings, supplier base rationalization can be achieved using effective RFPs. Despite all benefits, procurement team harbor mixed feelings for issuing RFPs in direct material sourcing. Issues of expensive RFPs, inflexible RFPs, extent of procurement coordination and ineffective vendor response rate to RFP are recurring problems every day. An effective RFP solution is needed to solve the procurement challenges and delivers immediate ROI.
Aavenir RFPflow
Aavenir’s flow suite is focused on building simplified Source-to-Pay solutions for procurement teams. RFPflow provides a collaborative RFP authoring platform using the digital workflow of ServiceNow. This plug and play application enables your enterprise sourcing and procurement teams to create RFPs on Day 1 plus achieve a standardized RFP management process in a single click.
There are various stages involved to standardize the RFP process, starting with:
1. Prepareflow
Preparing RFPs is a time-consuming and effort-draining exercise for procurement teams. Most organizations have supplier qualifying team or domain experts- who decide the evaluation criterias in RFPs and prepare RFPs. 50-70% of requirements and questions are repetitive in organizational RFPs.
RFPflow’s Prepareflow provides a centralized repository for managing legacy RFP templates and supplier questionnaires. An employee can create a brand-new RFP or can clone any legacy RFP stock template for to rapidly deploy RFP. The domain experts can simply validate the RFPs using smart templates and questions library. This fast-tracks the RFP authoring-to-award cycle time and delivers standardized strategic sourcing experience to procurement team
2. Publishflow
Procurement teams rush to meet deadlines to publish RFPs to existing vendors and potential vendors. In RFP publish stage, procurement team is overwhelmed with queries from vendors and rushing to meet RFP deadlines.
RFPflow’s Publishflow helps procurement managers create procurement milestones and set deadline reminders for all stakeholders using powerful workflow of ServiceNow. Procurement team can publish RFPs and involve stakeholders on NOW platform. RFPflow provides an integrated Source-to-Contract solution to manage the data flow from RFPs into Contracts.
3. Collaborateflow
Long, expensive RFx-to-award cycles and access to information by multiple stakeholders are costly bottlenecks in the RFP process. At the moment, enterprises use emails communication and MS-Excel for documenting the RFP responses between internal stakeholders and vendor teams, eventually creating sourcing chaos.
RFPflow’s Collaborateflow enables suppliers to use the most widely office application – Microsoft Word for responding to RFPs. With a powerful ‘response ingesting’ feature of RFPflow, sourcing managers can see the information flowing directly to Aavenir’s RFPflow and enable audit trail for all communication. There is no need to download supplier responses and uploading into the RFP tool! The automated digital workflow helps users to manage deadlines to get alerts and notifications in each milestone during RFP process. Combining the various RFPflow’s collaborative features, procurement team achieves cost-effective strategic sourcing and streamlines RFP management.
4. Evaluateflow
Each RFP attracts a minimum of 15-20 vendors and responses totaling to 40-60 questions per RFP. In the RFP evaluation stage, internal stakeholders need to evaluate individual vendor responses and collectively compare the vendor responses.
RFPflow’s Evaluateflow helps internal stakeholders to provide quantitative score for individual vendor responses. RFPflow will collate the quantitative score across stakeholders based on weightage assigned in Questionnaire stage. The strategic sourcing product – RFPflow delivers side-by-side comparison of vendor responses to provide evaluators with both panoramic and granular overview of various interested vendors. This scoring method helps organization to achieve streamlined strategic sourcing within organization and meet deadlines.
RFPflow’s Business Benefits
- Achieve 68% increase in RFP compliance
- 40% faster RFx-to-award supplier cycle time
- 15% cost savings with centralized team sourcing approach
- Enabled a collaborative approach to evaluate and qualify new suppliers on ServiceNow
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