RFP Software for Collaborative RFP Authoring

Sourcing is not something that is done in isolation. Rarely is a category manager responsible for every single activity, so being able to work as a team to create sourcing events is essential.

Whether you’re looking to appoint new suppliers for key commodities, adding new categories to your strategic sourcing program, or just want to reduce the price you pay for a standard service, there’s a process and workflow that you’ll want to follow, probably unique to your company.

GEP SMART™ lets you choose, down to a case-by-case basis, who can do what in creating and publishing a request for proposal or running an auction. Have a senior colleague who must sign off an RFP before you send it to the suppliers? Simply add that colleague as an approver. Add a team of colleagues contributing to the questionnaire section of the event as co-authors. Perhaps you have another team to evaluate and score the supplier responses. Not an issue — add them as evaluators. What you get is collaborative RFP authoring at its best, based on your organization’s unique sourcing workflow.

GEP SMART gives you complete flexibility to build the team around each e-sourcing event to optimize the performance and outcome of that event and drive greater savings, with full oversight and audit control.

Flexibility to Source the Way You Want

It’s not every organization – or perhaps not even any organization – that has only one way of conducting a sourcing project. Without a doubt, there is more than one “right” way to achieve the desired result.

Consider a straightforward case for sourcing – finding a supplier for a commodity at the lowest market price. There are, perhaps as many ways of arriving at the supplier and the price as there are suppliers out there. You could run an auction, invite proposals, run a closed-bid tender, or simply phone around and negotiate one-on-one until you get the best deal. 

There’s no right or wrong method, what works in one situation is not always going to work in every other, and you may want to mix and match different approaches to suit the geography or the market.

Your sourcing software will need to be as flexible as you are, but at the same time let you draw on past successes and reuse effective strategies time and again.

Different sourcing professionals can bring different expertise to the business and so the collaborative platform of GEP SMART lets you take advantage of the strengths of your team as well as the full range of tactics you can deploy.