The world of procurement has seen many new achievements in technology post-pandemic, and strategic sourcing is one of the significant attainments.
A report by Harvard Business Review Analytics Services found that 45% of procurement leaders plan to opt for sourcing automation.
Highly inclined to emails, spreadsheets, and manual processes, the sourcing industry was overlooked in the digitized world, but not anymore. Slow, error-prone, and monotonous tasks need a quick switch with strategic sourcing to streamline preparing an RFx to evaluate and award a bid.
How Does Sourcing Automation Help?
Vendor Selection Process
The power of automation boosts the supplier evaluation process. It allows you to create RFPs faster with pre-built supplier evaluation questionnaires and business-specific RFP templates. An advanced RFP software offer will offer
- Simple drag-and-drop interface to collate required questions
- Possibility to build your vendor selection question library
- Assign different weightage to sections for final supplier evaluation
- Revisit existing RFPs and sectional supplier questions
Automate Other Manual Tasks
Multiple sourcing events can be automated, including RFP, RFQ (Request for Quotation), and RFI for multiple vendors. This includes:
- Sending supplier selection questionnaire in a click
- Centralizing supplier communication with transparency
Streamline Sourcing Workflow
In managing multiple vendor requests and larger team size, a sourcing manager will likely face issues of the track ‘who is doing what.’ Here, an advanced RFx system allows you to
- Assign roles and tasks to the sourcing team
- Set milestones to speed up the vendor evaluation and sourcing process
- View the status of every stakeholder against their assigned responsibilities
- Set up a digital workflow to never miss RFP deadlines
Easier Collaboration with Suppliers
Let your RFP software collaborate between businesses and suppliers with AI in place. It is an effortless process that only needs your vendors to be on the same RFP tool. Here is how
- Publish your RFPs to the defined vendor list from within the RFP tool
- Let suppliers respond using MS word or MS Excel
- Stakeholders are notified of the responses
- AI will evaluate and recommend vendor basis responses received
- You will have the aggregated score
Monitor Sourcing Analytics
Now, quicken your RFx management and check sourcing cycles with a comprehensive report on identified bottlenecks and assigned deadlines. Further, keep track of
- Supplier response rate and how to improve it
- RFx process touchpoints from creation to awarding bids
- RFP metrics on the configurable dashboard
- Milestones planned and status achieved in real-time
- Audit trail in terms of unified communications
Well, the story does not end here. One of the significant problems with an unintegrated and manual RFP process is that RFx processes are not connected to Contract management processes that, increase the workload of teams, including sourcing and procurement. Moreover, purchasing a separate tool gets expensive. This is why you need to switch to Aavenir RFPflow.
