With ever-changing business models, business operating practices are also evolving. Large organizations utilize complex bid management system or tender management processes to search for potentially good companies that can take charge of providing them the best services or products at the most competitive costs. Usually, bidding or tendering is a manual, process-driven activity that involves a lot of time, effort, resources, costs, and involvement of top people in the company. Constant involvement and keen attention of key resources in any business is a big mantra for a successful bid or tender management lifecycle. Employees also keep looking for solutions for proposal management or procurement management tasks that have a very close relationship with bidding solutions.
In a manual bidding process, organizations first identify and analyze the requirements for a new project or service to be outsourced. The bid owner creates a detailed proposal document that explains each aspect of the project requirement. Bidders are then identified and sent invitations to submit their bids against the proposal. They must submit a proposal in commercial as well as technical aspects. Bid owners have to identify evaluation teams for both aspects. After all, bidders have submitted their documents and the bid is closed, evaluation teams get access to the documents. It is very important to maintain a high level of security and confidentiality in the process, so no data is leaked or manipulated at any time.
Since the manual process of bid management involves plenty of resources and sharing of several documents, it becomes important to manage excellent team collaboration. Automation of this complete workflow is the key to overcoming all such challenges and leveraging SharePoint technology is the silver lining in the cloud.
SharePoint is a perfect collaboration tool and has a lot of unique features which make it an efficient platform for bid management systems like SharePoint libraries, permission levels, enormous cloud storage, and much more. Let’s check out some of the features below:
1. Perfect collaboration platform
2. Excellent document management
3. User access permissions
4. Allows vendor authentication as a guest user
5. Enormous cloud storage
6. Easy user interface and intuitive app
7. No high-level technical knowledge required
8. Custom branding possible
9. Easily available SharePoint subscription at low cost
10. Version control of documents
11. Email notifications managed easily
As discussed earlier, manual tender processes can be long and cumbersome, often taking two to three months, sometimes longer. Proposals and invitations are shared with the bidders through posts, emails, or even personally. It can be very expensive for both the buyer and supplier organizations.
Sometimes bidders travel from one place to another just to make sure their bid documents are submitted safely to the right person at the right time. This is a stressful job and takes up a lot of productive hours of employees.
On the other hand, can you imagine having one common portal where bid owners, bidders, and an evaluation team all can log in with their credentials and collaborate easily?
Bid owners come and post their proposals. They don’t even need to worry about sending invitations. Portal handles everything! Bidders come and check requirements. They can upload their bid documents until the bid closes. The evaluation team also comes in the picture when all submissions are done and the bid closes. Notifications are sent by the system automatically when any update is needed to be shared.
1. Easy creation of proposal by bid owner
2. Set bid start date and closing date
3. Easy editing of proposal before bid start date
4. Enormous storage for saving documents
5. Version maintained for document updates
6. Guest user authentication
7. Activity logs maintained
8. Bid Approval workflow
9. Notifications when bid starts, before closing, and when edited
10. Invite bidders and evaluation team from within the system
11. Evaluation team can access bids only after bid is closed
12. Bidders have access to their own documents
13. Bidders cannot access/edit submission after bid is closed
14. Evaluation can only be done after all members login at least once together
With all these several features at your fingertips, you can easily plan to take your organization to next level of performance by switching to the automated tender management solution. We know that different organizations have different business needs and may need a change in the process or workflow of any task. Since we understand the need to be flexible, we can easily modify the flow process to suit your company’s business and customize the system as per your needs.
To know more details about our product or want to book a quick demo check our Bid Management Software.
