Identifying quality vendors for the ongoing procurement need at the right price is Holy Grail for any procurement team. Many procurement professionals attest that RFPs act as the backbone of direct material sourcing and effective supplier management. Strategic procurement initiatives such as target savings, supplier base rationalization can be achieved using effective procurement software.
Despite all benefits, the procurement team harbor mixed feelings for issuing RFPs in direct material sourcing. Issues of expensive RFPs, inflexible RFPs, the extent of procurement coordination, and the ineffective vendor response rate to RFP are recurring problems every day. Effective procurement software is needed to create an RFP and solve the RFP management challenges and delivers immediate ROI.
Aavenir RFPflow: Sourcing and Procurement Software for RFP Management
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 teams or domain experts- who decide the evaluation criteria 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 to rapidly deploy RFP. The domain experts can simply validate the RFPs using smart templates and a questions library. This fast-tracks the RFP authoring-to-award cycle time and delivers standardized strategic sourcing experience to the procurement team
2. Publishflow
Procurement teams rush to meet deadlines to publish RFPs to existing vendors and potential vendors. In RFP publish stage, the 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 the powerful workflow of ServiceNow. The procurement team can publish RFPs and involve stakeholders on the 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 popular 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 the RFP process. Combining the various RFPflow’s collaborative features, the 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 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 scores for individual vendor responses. RFPflow will collate the quantitative score across stakeholders based on the weightage assigned in the questionnaire stage. The strategic sourcing product – RFPflow delivers a side-by-side comparison of vendor responses to provide evaluators with both panoramic and granular overview of various interested vendors. This scoring method helps organizations to achieve streamlined strategic sourcing within organizations and meet deadlines.
RFPflow’s Business Benefits
Unlock the potential of the procurement team:
- 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
Next Steps:
Get started with Aavenir flow suite caters to Source-to-Pay (S2P) domain on the NOW platform. Aavenir RFPflow Invoiceflow and Aavenir Contractflow are already available on the ServiceNow app store.
