Spring Clean your purchasing process
Spring has officially sprung! It’s time for April showers to bring May flowers, and a new purchasing process! While the weather may not have turned for some of us quite yet, it‘s not too early to start thinking about your spring cleaning. And in addition to cleaning out that cluttered garage or basement, why not also look at organizing your work area as well? A good place to start is to clean up your local government agency’s purchasing process from manual and paper processes.
Get the clutter out of the office
When getting started with spring cleaning, everyone has a similar goal: to clear out space. There’s no reason why you can’t clear space at the office as well by clearing out all of the paperwork associated with any of your agency’s solicitations. Joining an e-procurement solution is a great way to eliminate the paper currently required for your purchasing process. In fact, BidNet Direct allows your agency to make your purchasing process as paperless as you’d like! No longer will you have to have dozens of copies of bid specifications all over your office to distribute to interested vendors. Instead, your agency will have its own branded page that vendors can visit to find and download all of your bid information. If you so choose, you can also reduce the number of bid responses cluttering your agency’s office by accepting electronic bid responses. Rather than receiving hard copy bid submissions or e-mailed submissions that you then print to put with the rest, you can set up electronic bid submission to eliminate all of these paper copies you have around the office! If you decide that you don’t want to limit to only electronic submissions, you can also set it up to allow both hard copy or electronic submissions, thereby decreasing the number of hard copy responses you receive while still providing flexibility for your vendors. Going paperless with BidNet Direct doesn’t stop their either. With BidNet Direct you can also have your planholder’s list, bid evaluation, and even contracts all digital and online, thereby requiring no paper!
Keep your solicitations organized
Another goal when starting spring cleaning is to get things more organized. BidNet Direct’s purchasing platform does just that for all of your solicitations and corresponding data! Rather than having to keep track of all aspects of your solicitations manually, the platform does it all for you! For instance, all questions that are asked by vendors are kept within each specific solicitation. By keeping all questions within the specific solicitation page, it makes answering questions easier as now you won’t have to track down questions submitted via email. This can be a huge time saver for purchasing professionals like you, especially if your agency has multiple solicitations open at a given time. The same can be said for all bid submissions that were submitted electronically. Rather than having to have endless file cabinets filled with bid responses from several years ago, BidNet Direct keeps all solicitations, addenda, and submitted responses stored within your personalized platform for as long as your agency deems necessary. Even reports and planholder’s lists become more organized, with your agency having instant access to lists of all vendors who have interacted with your bid and what documents they have downloaded. This helps you ensure that all bid submissions being considered are coming from vendors who have downloaded all necessary requirements and addenda, and therefore have all of the necessary information to submit a full bid (maybe online via electronic bid submission, saving even more paper!).
Spring Cleaning can be a stressful task. You might regularly wonder whether or not to get rid of something because you may want to use it in the future. Cleaning up the paper clutter in purchasing is easy and stress-free with an e-sourcing solution like BidNet Direct. Joining BidNet Direct’s purchasing platform will clean up every step of your purchasing process while ensuring the documents and procurement information is still secure and readily available.
Find out how BidNet Direct can help your government organization today! 
