Today’s post is by Heather Powell, Customer Services Manager at SafeSourcing Inc.

We will continue to look at those details; wrapping up tomorrow with a view of how to transition the information you get from an RFI to an RFP.

Schedules or Timelines: This is the time frame of the expectation of when the RFP is sent to the vendors, when questions (about the specifications or the RFP process) are due from the vendors, when the vendors can expect the questions with answers to be return, when the RFP is due to be complete.

Contract Type: This defines to the vendor if the contract is a spot buy, a one year, two year, or longer contract. There may be additional special contractual requirements added within this area. 

Data Requirements: This can vary from the type of RFP you many want to run, but every RFP should collect basic information about the vendors, their name, address, primary business, who the primary contact with their information, usually a list of 3-5 references, a list of current businesses that are similar in size to the company running the RFP.

Terms and Conditions: General and special arrangements, provisions, requirements, rules, specifications, and standards that form an integral part of an agreement or contract.

Description of Goods and/or Services to Be Procured:  This is to define what you are looking specifically to buy. It is a tie in between your scope of work and your specifications. This area is typically where you are going to ask the vendor to give their proposal of price based on your needs defined and within the guidelines of the specifications.

Instructions for preparation of technical, management, and/or cost proposals: These are the details on how to complete the RFP. If online through SafeSourcing, you will be given a deadline to complete the RFP, trained on how to enter your RFP and Pricing, and the additional information the customer may need as supplemental documentation and how to submit that information. In a sealed bid, you will be given specific instructions on what documents need to be signed and returned, what additional information needs to be submitted and the expectations on how to submit it, and specifically how to mail it into the government agency that will review it by a set date and time.

SafeSourcing can help you with your needs in creating, running, and reporting on a RFP for any item, project, or industry need. Tomorrow we will wrap up the series by looking at the path of information from the RFI to RFP and how to use that information to make the best decisions. For more information on how we can help you with your procurement needs or on our “Risk Free” trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.  We have an entire customer services team waiting to assist you today.

We look forward to your comments.

Today’s post is from Sarah Kouse a project manager at SafeSourcing.

If you are buying name brand ink (HP, Epson, Canon, etc.) for your printer when you run out, you may be spending a significant more than if you were to purchase an “off-brand” or remanufactured printer ink.

Remanufactured printer ink looks the same, prints the same, and even has the same quality, but could potentially save your company a significant amount of money if you switched from the name brand ink, and if your spend is large enough it might event get your current supplier to lower your name brand product in order to keep your business. This of course depends which product they make the most margin on.

By way of a recent example, a black ink cartridge for an HP Officejet printer that goes for around $40, you could get a combo pack set of remanufactured ink, including all of the colors (Black, Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow) for around $30. That’s about $7.50 per cartridge and 25% below your current price. If you were buying just black ink, you could purchase 5 times the amount of remanufactured black ink for the price of one single name brand cartridge. Obviously the results may differ based on volume.

The savings generated by switching to remanufactured ink can be significant, especially based on the amount of printing most companies do.

If you’d like to learn how we can help your reduce your printing costs, contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

Today’s post is by Mark Davis; Sr. Vice President and COO at SafeSourcing. Mark asks

There are a number of trends occurring in the support of IT products and processes today, not the least of which are the trends of increasing expansion of business through acquisition and the decreasing number of qualified resources with experience necessary to perform the tasks a company needs.  When you couple these two trends with the trend of employees having shorter and shorter stays working for a company, it is no wonder companies are looking to outsourced IT break fix and managed services to provide a backup to their existing staffs.

In today’s blog we will be looking at a few of the points to keep in mind as you explore this area of managed services for your company; looking at your current landscape, the questions you should be asking about where you want to head as an organization and the methods you can use to evaluate the vendors against your eventual goals.

Current Landscape – As with any project, understanding where you want to go starts with understanding where you came from and more importantly, where you are now.  With acquisitions and growth happening in so many industries it becomes a challenge to support new infrastructures and IT equipment that the existing staff may have no familiarity with.  This is especially true in the retail industry where new acquisitions can mean new Loss Prevention equipment, new scanners, new Point-of-sale equipment and software.  Geographic expansion can also create difficulties as recruiting and managing your own IT resources requires looking at areas the company may have less knowledge.  Outsourced field service companies can be a great addition to assist in bridging the gap of new equipment experience or geographical coverage on either a temporary or permanent basis.

Create the Project – How you know where your company is currently, the next step is to determine how the outsourced supplier will be used by your organization.  In the case of expansion this may be filling geographical needs that your current staff cannot support or it could mean providing a temporary knowledge bridge of unfamiliar equipment until your own staff can be brought up to speed or the equipment can be standardized to something more familiar.  Some of the things that will need to be determined with your organization are:
•   Pricing – Generally there will be a “per incident” or monthly flat fee offering.
•   Flow of support for issues from your employees to the supplier
•   The purpose of the managed provider – Staff augmentation (temporary or permanent) or special projects.
•   The services you will be expecting them to perform.

Evaluate the Suppliers –  Once you have determined your current needs and the plan for how best to fill them it is time to evaluate the suppliers who can help you.  Depending on the level of service you have details for; this may begin as a Request for Information, gathering general information about what each supplier can offer and who they are working with today as well as their preferred pricing model.  If the scope of service is well-determined moving right into a Request for Proposal would be the first step.  Locations, detailed service expectations and equipment count are all important pieces that would be needed for suppliers to provide you with accurate pricing.  Once this has been collected and a Statement of Work and pricing model have been established based on the RFP responses the final stage would be a Request for Quote or Tender, requiring all invited participants to provide pricing in the model you have requested. 

Outsourced Managed Services are becoming commonplace in how we do business and will continue to do business in the future especially for National companies how need services across a large portion or all of the country.  Maintaining your IT equipment is one of the fastest growing managed service industries and can be used affectively once your goals have been established for their use.  For more information on how we can help you evaluate suppliers against these goals or on our “Risk Free” trial program, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.  We have an entire customer services team waiting to assist you today.

We look forward to your comments.

Today?s post is from Michael Figueroa an Account Manager at SafeSourcing

Most human beings are averse to ideas that go against conventional wisdom. Yet, usually the most successful innovations come from ideas that of course, go against conventional wisdom. Alexander Graham Bell was told nobody would want to use and idiotic device like the telephone by the companies he pitched his ideas to. Arnold Schwarzenegger was told he was too big and had too thick an accent to get anywhere in the movie business. Andreas Pavel?s ideas for a portable music player were rejected 5 years before the Walkman when he was told nobody wanted to walk around in public with headphones on. We have a natural tendency to reject those ideas that exist outside of the status quo.

A 2011 study entitled ?The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas? suggested that even those who have creative thinking as a goal are much more biased against creativity than they realize. The reason for this the study goes on to explain, is that all human beings have an innate bias toward ideas that represent uncertainty. At its core, a creative proposal is an idea that breaks the rules; social, procedural, or otherwise. So how else is your organization going to ever be able to fully capture productive creativity (innovation) without incorporating mechanisms that force innovations to go through a vetting process? Innovation might be your ideal, but without a plan, is it ever going to be your reality?

Many businesses claim to foster an ?environment of innovation?. But this environment is only going to be as much of a fertile ground for new ideas as its leadership?s own blind spots. Don?t think you have any blind spots? Well, that?s why they?re called blind spots? ;)? And without a mechanism or a process that forces leadership to engage uncomfortable ideas, the BUSINESSES innovations will forever be limited by the leadership?s PERSONAL patterns of thinking.

It?s been said that significant change within a business can only be accomplished by business guerilla tactics, by being willing to throw some informational grenades behind the enemy lines of workplace apathy before the culture will engage the forces of change it needs to face. These disruptions can be good for business if handled correctly, but expect some resistance. Without mechanisms in place to capture and squeeze the value out of new ideas, you can almost always expect them to go nowhere.

Some companies balk at the idea of using eNegotiation tools to meet their procurement needs. It?s different, it?s new, and it takes a little bit of study to understand. Forget that it?s also proven. But that?s why we love to engage new clients and suppliers, because we have the methods and track records in place to show why this unconventional idea also has above conventional results.

If you?d like help with your sourcing needs, please contact a Safesourcing customer services account manager.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments