Procurement is a critical function for government and public sector organizations, and reducing costs while increasing efficiency is a constant goal. While there are standard challenges faced by procurement departments such as identifying needs, sourcing and managing vendors, managing risk, and processing payments, the public sector procurement process has its own unique and recurring challenges such as:

  • Inefficient supplier communication
  • Lack of data and analytics that can help with optimization and consolidation
  • Aligning the buying process with the organization’s strategic goals and plans
  • Difficulty in integrating post-purchase feedback from across the organization into the buying process
  • Requestors lacking visibility over the entire purchase process and engagement in supplier communication and requirement definition
  • Lack of transparency over the buying process impacting corporate governance and compliance
  • Slow execution and long buying cycles

While dedicated procurement software has been able to solve many of these challenges, there is still a lack of integration with other organizational and business units, and a lack of strategic alignment with the organization’s overall goals and plans. Many of these systems don’t seem to integrate internal and external communication related to the buying process and as a result they produce information silos in procurement departments. Many of them have their own mailroom and communication modules, but they often operate in isolation, and they become yet another communication system to which the organization has to adapt.

On the bright side, we have been able to solve these challenges for many of our clients with the bid management module, which is an extension of the functionalities of our smart collaboration suite Tarasol.

The bid management module helps achieve efficient collaboration, unified communication, and strategic alignment by integrating the buying process with internal communication, engaging stakeholders in the process, and providing them with full visibility. The module also provides a full cycle view of a procurement project, enabling the understanding of how a certain vendor or procurement project performed throughout its lifecycle, and integrating user feedback into the buying process.

Built using our BPM suite ArcMate EZIFlow, the bid management module of Tarasol features:

  • RFx process standardization and workflow automation
  • Buying committee management and the ability to define different types of committees for bid opening, examination, technical, and commercial evaluation.
  • Automated process for bid receipt acknowledgment
  • Pre-defined evaluation templates
  • Full integration with Tarasol’s key modules of correspondence, meeting and task management. Buying committees are able to schedule meetings, assign tasks, create correspondence and chat internally in relation to a specific bid project.

To learn more about the bid management module or our correspondence, task and meeting management system Tarasol please speak to one of our consultants today to schedule a demo.