e-Tender

The enterprise can use Tender Template to control the access of the tender documents by types (e.g., technical evaluators can view technical documents only but not business or financial documents).

The rules (such as below) defined in each tender template will be strictly enforced by the system for all the tenders using that template.

• Minimum and maximum # of suppliers to participate in the tender
• Allow only suppliers of certain types, regions and grades to participate in the tender
• Suppliers must offer certain product items to participate in the tender
• Suppliers must process additional qualifications to participate in the tender
• Initial supplier selection is “sheer random”, “sheer manual” or “combination” 
• Criteria for long-list to short-list
• Restricted to certain submission methods

The enterprise can define different experts for different areas for tendering purpose.  The experts can be selected for different tender activities such as initial supplier selection, document preparation, response evaluation, negotiation and final selection. When the experts are associated with different tender activities, they will have different access privileges. Tender Expert Management will help to ensure that each tender activity will assign sufficient experts from different needed areas to do the job.

The enterprise can define different approval flows for different tender natures. Each approval flow can have multiple stages and each stage can have multiple steps and each steps can have multiple mandatory or alternate approvers. The approval stages and steps can be set to be executed in parallel, seriously or combination. The tender amount can be used as the branch condition of the approval flow for the purpose of controlling certain approval stages can or cannot be bypassed. The details of the current state of the approval flow can be viewed in real-time and exported for the reporting purpose. The system can be set to automatically send alert messages to remind people that the tender is pending their approval or their approval is overdue.

The system controls the minimum and maximum numbers of suppliers and whether they are selected totally by random, totally by manual or certain number by random and certain number by manual based on the tender nature. After the initial long list of suppliers is determined, the supplier selection team can convert the long list to short list in one or multiple rounds. In each round, the supplier selection team must input the selection criteria and score the suppliers accordingly. After the short list is determined, the supplier selection team must submit the short list for approval in order to become official.

can send e-Invitation to the selected suppliers to invite them to participate in the tender. Each invited supplier can accept or decline (with specific reason) directly. Once the invited supplier confirms its participation, it can start using the e-Tender Q&A facility to ask questions. The system will also automatically collect the data and provide the statistics on the number of participations, declines and winnings of each supplier. 

allows the tender responsible persons to set the control on the tender document reviews and approvals. Tender documents and their amendments can only be sent to suppliers after the approval of the Issuing Committee. Tender documents can be sent to suppliers via supplier website, email, regular mail or hand delivery and issuing history will be automatically logged by the system.

The participating suppliers can use the Q&A facility to ask questions and the question-answering can be viewed by all suppliers for transparency reason. The Q&A facility allows the user to post a question or discussion topic and multiple parties can respond to the questions or ask additional questions.

The Tender Opening Committee can be composed from different people from different external and internal organizations. The Tender Opening Committee controls when the tender can be opened and the responses from suppliers can be viewed. No supplier’s tender response can be opened and viewed until the full approval of the Tender Open Committee.

For Request for Quotation, the Tender Evaluation Team can choose having the system to do the automatically scoring. For Request for Proposal and Request for Information, the Tender Evaluation Team can use the Question & Scoring Tool to design the Questionnaire which will be automatically scored after each participating supplier fills in its answers. The Tender Evaluation Team can also choose to manually score each tender response by entering the criteria and their weights into the system and then do the manual scoring. In any case, the system will summarize the total score for each supplier and rank all the participating suppliers according to their total score. After knowing which participating suppliers have the passing score and which ones don’t, the Tender Evaluation Team can then decide to do the negotiation next or skip the negotiation process and directly recommend a number of top ranking suppliers for the final selection.

If the Tender Evaluation Team decides to conduct the negotiation, the team members can use the Multi-Party Negotiation Tool to discuss with each supplier individually. The negotiation can be done in real-time or post-and-wait-for-response.  All discussion information will be logged and can’t be deleted. 

After the negotiation is done, the Tender Evaluation Team can update each supplier’s scoring and then recommend a number of the top ranking suppliers for the final selection.

The tender responsible persons can set the rule to mandate the Tender Evaluation Team to do the risk assessment for the recommended suppliers. The Final Section Committee can review the scoring details of each recommended supplier, its associated risks and other business factors such as other business partnerships and then make the final decision.

In some situations, the Final Selection Committee can also make the final selection very simple such as the supplier that has the highest total score will be the winner.

After the final selection is done, the system will automatically send out notice to the winner and the losers based on the pre-defined notice letters defined by the enterprise. The tender responsible can also modify the letter on the fly.

An e-Contract can be automatically generated from the e-Tender after the final selection is complete. The user can specify price, deliverable, due date, Service Level Agreement (SLA), penalty, payment term and renewal information in the e-Contract. Once the e-Contract is setup, the supplier can start delivering according to the deliverable milestones defined in the e-Contract and delivery will automatically trigger review and acceptance on the enterprise side. The e-SLA results will be automatically captured and calculated in real-time based on the preset criteria. If an e-SLA result triggers a penalty, the penalty amount will be automatically aggregated and reflected in the Profit & Loss of the e-Contract.

can automatically collect all the tender statistics such as supplier’s participation rate, winning rate, successful project completion rate, late delivery rate, return rate etc. These fields can be made available in the Point-and-click Report Generator to generate multi-dimensional reports, bar charts, pie charts and trend graphs.