For all of the technology advances embraced by enterprises over the past decade, you’d think that the RFP process would be just as technologically advanced as so many other important business processes. Unfortunately, the process still looks a lot like this:
Step 1: Procurement lead receives request for a specific item.
Step 2: Procurement lead Googles possible vendors.
Step 3: Procurement lead manually looks up product SKUs.
Step 4: Procurement team consolidates research into Excel spreadsheet/template/doc.
Step 5: Procurement lead sends out emails to individual vendors.
Step 6: Vendors and procurement team goes back and forth individually regarding questions.
Step 7: Vendors take weeks to submit bids.
Step 8: Procurement team needs to manually circulate bids for review.
Step 9: Procurement team communicates back with vendors on award decision.
Step 10: Procurement team manually re-enters RFP details into their contracting or ERP system.
Step 11: When compliance or diversity questions come up, the procurement team shuffles through emails, spreadsheets and sticky notes to provide one-time manual reports.
When all is said and done, the team has spent dozens of hours researching and sourcing vendors, creating the RFP, and manually managing the bidding process with vendors. Even the more advanced procurement departments rely on dedicated RFP tools for their most complex purchases, greatly limiting their view into spend across the organization. It’s no wonder then, that procurement teams are only able to conduct about 20 RFPs per year.
Today, we’re proud to announce a way to efficiently source more strategic purchases than ever before—RFPs now in Fairmarkit. No more headaches, endless clicks and calls or scrolling databases—this all-in-one sourcing solution extends the capabilities of our existing RFQ capabilities to automate and streamline the RFP process for procurement teams—in a single, consolidated platform.
Here’s how it works:
- Efficiency-first approach: Our automated solution taps into a vast pool of suppliers and vendors to enable more bids with fewer steps and less time. As a result, teams are able to eliminate painstaking manual efforts and cut the time per event by over half.
- One-stop sourcing: By combining our RFQ and RFP capabilities into one, consolidated platform, we provide a central source of information on your sourcing activity and provide structured reports for greater visibility into spend activity.
- Seamless integration: Our product extends the value of every technology system a customer uses by leveraging your data without duplicating work or overhauling your systems.
The downstream effect of using Fairmarkit for RFPs, of course, is that it saves teams time and costs (not to mention clicks, calls and cries), and improves your organization’s overall bottom line. With all these advantages, it’s hard to understand how organizations could manage RFPs any other way.
With the addition of RFPs, we are doubling down on being an all-in-one sourcing platform, offering automated RFQs, supplier diversity and sustainability enrichment, deep embedded analytics, and rapid integrations with any system.
We’ve already heard great things from our customers that have been using Fairmarkit RFPs, and we’re excited to roll it out to even more businesses over the coming months. If you’re interested in bringing easy and efficient sourcing to your organization, check out what’s new at fairmarkit.com/rfp.
Forget the headache—let us help your team get back to doing what’s important.
