This question was submitted by a prospect in a recent meeting.
Todays post is from Ronald D. Southard, CEO at SafeSourcing
In the many industries, preliminary price quotes are normally used as part of a Request for Information (RFI) or Request for Proposal (RFP) process. The actual reverse auction event is normally the Request for Quote phase or RFQ and historically has been used for final price compression. However there are large events that may change this strategy.
In large retail events with hundreds of products such as a prescription drugs, retailers may allow early quoting just due to the magnitude of the information requiring entry by suppliers. There are however many other categories that might also benefit from this strategy. Transportation Lanes, Office Supplies (entire catalog), Safety Products, MRO and Waste Management come immediately to mind. This process can take place several weeks prior to the live reverse auction but in many cases today may actually happen within 48 hours of the actual compression event.
At times, this may also be a good practice when there are a large number of new suppliers participating in order to familiarize them with the use of the tool set beyond their normal training session. For a new supplier auction day can actually be a stressful.
There are many who don’t believe that there is a strategy to participating in a revere auction. Seasoned suppliers would argue that point. In fact, suppliers that use the SafeSourceIt™ eRFX system have a variety of ways to enter pricing including uploading spreadsheets and then downloading them immediately that contain low quote indicators. Suppliers can then focus on individual items, groups of items (lots and market baskets) and decile based category sets. In these large events, this allows suppliers to split the data entry amongst multiple analysts and enter pricing strategically.
Ultimately it’s the responsibility of the e-procurement providers to train all suppliers on the use of the tool set and its flexibility so that they can determine how they might strategically stage their input. That is of course if the solution provider has data entry flexibility as part of their toolset.
If you’d like to learn more about the SafeSourceIt™ family of creative sourcing tools, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Services associate.
We look forward to your comments.
