As a procurement professional, you know time and resources are scarce. Yet, the demand on the public sector keeps increasing. How do you juggle these competing demands without sacrificing quality or burning out your team? The answer lies in working smarter, not harder.
Here, we’ll discuss 4 strategies to help you get the most proposals per solicitation without overwhelming your team.
1. Streamline Your Solicitation Process
Whether you work in public procurement or a donut shop, you likely disfavor red tape. We do too.
Bogged down processes are a lose-lose for both public sector organizations and suppliers. Have you ever missed a crucial deadline because an important email got buried in your inbox? That’s what we’re talking about here.
When your solicitation process is manual and disjointed, you’re likely to face errors in documentation, communication, and submission. Not to mention, inefficient processes drain your resources. Spending hours checking and re-checking submissions is a waste of time and takes staff away from value-added, strategic activities.
Often, these processes create frustrations—both for you and your suppliers. When a process is manual and lengthy—requiring submission by mail or email—suppliers are less likely to participate. There’s also a high likelihood of submission errors, whether it be missed questions, missing attachments, or confusion about the due date.
We have a few suggestions to pull your team out of the depths of tedious work:
- Leverage a library of pre-populated templates to cut down on process time—like Open Access Community Projects.
- Automate notifications for your suppliers. It will be easier for you to create addendums, clear submission deadlines, or put out other information suppliers might need to succeed.
- Alert suppliers automatically of missing fields or attachments before they ever submit the bid with cloud-based solutions.
- Leverage an online submission portal for your suppliers. Not only with this make their lives easier, but it will also help you unify submissions and compile evaluation data.
Your staff and suppliers will thank you for eliminating the grunt work involved in creating and submitting proposals.
2. Expand Your Supplier Network
Easier said than done, right?
Nobody wants to spend their days manually hunting down supplier options only to have one of the tens they vetted to be selected.
However, when you leverage digital solutions, you open the door to a whole new world of supplier opportunities—without the grunt work. Purpose-built solutions automatically compile thousands of supplier options across the nation, making it easy for you to identify who has the potential to meet your needs.
(Fun fact: Euna Procurement gives organizations access to a pool of 700,000+ suppliers).
Beyond the massive reach, modern digital solutions also provide a seamless supplier experience, making the bidding process accessible and efficient. With intuitive interfaces and automated workflows, the administrative burden on suppliers is lifted off—allowing them to focus on crafting high-quality, competitive proposals. As a result, your organization benefits from a straightforward, efficient process that attracts a broader array of suppliers.
With more suppliers vying for your business, you’ll have many unique solutions and competitive pricing proposals to choose from. Not only does this drive innovation, but it also leads to cost savings and enhanced value for your organization.
3. Promote Supplier Diversity
Supporting DBEs is critical—we all know that. But, up to this point it’s been a time-consuming battle for procurement teams to contribute to this great cause.
That conflict is the reason why supplier diversity classifications are an essential part of solicitations. Cloud-based solutions make it easy to identify disadvantaged or minority owned businesses. At the click of a button, suppliers can identify themselves under specific categories and organizations can weight these factors during their evaluations.
By actively seeking to engage DBEs, you’ll directly contribute to the economic growth and equality in your community—and let’s not forget the added benefit of enriching your organization with suppliers that bring a diverse set of capabilities, views, and ideas.
4. Keep Your Process Transparent
Reminder: Receiving a mountain of bid responses is great, but only if the responses are relevant.
Who wants to waste time sifting through proposals that aren’t even relevant to your solicitation?
It’s important to be transparent and upfront about what your goals and standards are when you’re soliciting proposals. A hefty challenge for procurement professionals is ensuring suppliers fully understand what’s expected of them.
Vague or ambiguous instruction results in wasted evaluation time. To get the most valuable proposals per solicitation, you should strive to provide maximum context and clearly defined target outcomes. Industry-leading sourcing solutions, like Euna Procurement, provide the ability for suppliers to ask questions before they respond to solicitations to ensure the highest quality responses.
We wrote a blog to help evaluation teams create clear, concise criteria for evaluation. Check it out to start brainstorming specifications.
Work Smarter with Euna Procurement
You hold more power than you think when it comes to attaining valuable organizational goals and supporting your supplier community—and it doesn’t have to come at the cost of your sanity.
Consider leveraging purpose-built tech to bear the burden for you and make your team shine brighter than the sun. Interested in learning more? Request a demo of Euna Procurement today.
Read the next blog in the series: The Benefits of Using a Supplier Database for Agency & Supplier!