Top 7 Reasons to Adopt a Comprehensive E-Procurement System

Today, the way public procurement departments do business has changed, largely due to technology advances that have allowed purchasing teams to move away from paper-based processes and to embrace online platforms that simplify and streamline the process. E-procurement solutions take much of the difficulty out of sourcing goods and services and allow buying organizations to easily track project goals and manage complex procurement projects, among other benefits.

However, there is more to electronic procurement than simply posting bids and receiving responses. Vendor management, contract management, efficient bid evaluation and approval management are just a few aspects of purchasing that e-procurement can make more efficient, making sourcing easier for public purchasing professionals in the process.

Here are seven reasons your buying organization should utilize a comprehensive e-procurement system.

1. Save a lot of time

One of the immediate benefits of switching to e-procurement is the substantial time savings that your purchasing department will enjoy- simply as a result of moving from paper-based processes to an online system. Manually sorting and tracking every aspect of a procurement initiative is difficult enough, but doing so with paper documents and disparate information systems is even more labor-intensive and time consuming. With e-procurement, critical bid, vendor and contract information is stored in the cloud and easily accessible, making it easy to keep track of all your procurement initiatives from one location.

2. Easily qualify your vendor pool

Vendor qualification and management presents big challenges for buying organizations. It takes considerable effort to manually sort through each individual vendor in a pool to determine if they meet the qualification requirements for a given project and if they possess certifications. With a pre-qualification and certification module as part of a full suite of e-procurement solutions, buyers can create specific pre-qualification criteria basis to ensure they pick the right vendors for the job.

3. Track vendor performance

Wouldn’t it be great if you could track all aspects of vendor performance from one central location? That’s exactly what a robust e-procurement system provides. A module specifically designed for vendor performance tracking allows e-procurement and end users to monitor vendor accountability on a per-project or overall basis and to create detailed vendor scorecards. Custom parameters can also dictate precisely how vendor performance will be graded.

4. Easily publish and distribute bid documents

When it’s time to publish and circulate an important addendum or other documents to interested vendors, an included bid distribution module makes it easy for e-procurement users to select who will receive the document and quickly send it out. Compare this with manual processes that require purchasing managers to sort through email lists to determine who needs to receive the document, prepare an email and send it - and hope it doesn’t end up in vendors’ spam folders.

5. Evaluate multiple bids, quickly

By using a bid evaluation module as part of an e-procurement solution, purchasing professionals can easily compare critical bid information and make the job of choosing the winning bid that much easier. Thanks to rapid evaluation, organizations can reduce delays, keep their projects moving and tighten the bid-to-contract process. What’s more, a strong bid evaluation process helps to improve oversight and accountability during projects, ensuring peace of mind and fewer surprises.

6. Reduce risk and improve collaboration

One of the great things about e-procurement is that by leveraging the functionality of the solution’s several modules, buying organizations can create a new, streamlined workflow to improve collaboration and alignment. By designing your own custom workflows, you can foster greater synergy among everyone who needs to be consulted during a procurement project and ensure that the required stakeholders provide approvals at the right time.

7. Create and manage custom contracts

Trying to align contract templates and legal language can be a major hassle when you’re trying to coordinate a purchasing project. Contract management allows users to exercise full control of the contract creation process, including the ability to define custom business rules as needed. It’s also easy to create automated notifications and reminders for important dates and to delegate role-based access. Simply put, once you’ve used an electronic contract management tool, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

So there you have it. With the benefits we’ve outlined, it’s clear that adopting a full suite of cloud-based electronic procurement solutions is a winning decision. Empower your purchasing professionals with a robust e-procurement solution today and start enjoying time and resource savings, while future-proofing your organization for sourcing challenges yet to come.

Find out how BidNet Direct can help your government organization today!