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Scalability of Interactive Procurement Processes

Interactive procurement processes open up the channels of communication between supplier and buyer. They enable both sides to get a better understanding of the requirements and the solution that allows better deals to be brokered, bigger pies to be baked if you like. They also allow the gap between what the customer thinks they are getting and what the supplier is able to give to be narrowed. But often these processes are seen as complex and expensive exercises that require extended periods to execute. What if they could be adapted to allow any size procurement benefit from improved communication between the buyer and the seller.

Use of Subject Matter Expert in Procurement Processes

What are the benefits and risks associated with having a Subject Matter Expert involved in a procurement process and what role they can play. A Subject Matter Expert can position a project to achieve the very best outcomes, or they can choke the project into mediocrity, even potential failure. Let’s take a look at how to get the very best value from these highly skilled, but specialised, advisors.

Procurement Tasks for quite times

Many organisations have a slow down through festive seasons as many people head off on holidays and the volume of work often slows. So if you’re lucky enough to be working during a quite time, what procurement tasks can you do to take advantage of the extra flexibility and set yourself up for when the pace picks up again?

Does your market engagement model surprise your vendors?

When going to market for the provision of new goods or services, we are aiming to get the best deal we can and often in the shortest possible time, but are these two objectives mutually exclusive? Can you expect the best outcomes when you minimise the vendors response time? Does the market engagement model you currently use to engage the market often result in catching the suppliers unprepared and unable to provide a good response?

The real cost of low integrity procurement

Last year I noted two significant cases, amongst many others, of poor procurement practices resulting court cases and the payment of damages. Envoy Relocation Services successfully sued the Canadian Government for unfair treatment during successive procurement processes. The court awarded Envoy $30 million in lost profits and also directed the Government to pay Envoys $10 million legal costs; in another case, a major retailer sued a Central NSW coast council in Australia over a faulty process, resulting in damages of around $2 million being awarded to the retailer. The council later appealed and won, but the court, delays and internal staff costs must have been significant. While these commercial horror stories will capture the headlines and provide great examples for frightening clients during probity briefings, are the fines the only damage suffered by organisations through poor procurement practices resulting in low integrity procurement.

A simple guide to writing good criteria

I’ve seen a lot of guides and presentations outlining, sometimes in great detail, what it takes to write a good criteria for an invitation document, but who can remember all of that. In reality, you can break it down into three areas of consideration. What do I want supplied; How will I know a supplier has it; How will I assess their responses.

Qld State Government – New Tender and Contract Templates

As a key component of their goal of making it easier and more efficient for suppliers and agencies to do business with each other, in February this year the Procurement Transformation Division launched a new set of goods and services procurement invitation and contractual frameworks for use by all Government Agencies. If you are a supplier to or a buyer for the Queensland State Government and you haven’t familiarised yourself with them yet, then it is high time you did. So what is new and what do we need to know about this new framework?

Advanced Excel Contracts Manager – Generate Unique ID’s

A critical function of any contracts and procurement process management solution is to generate a unique identifier for each process and contract. I cannot stress enough how important it is to allocate an identifier to a process and to use it for all communications regarding the process and the contract, both internally and externally. Why? Because loss of clarity in communications can result in regrettable errors. In addition to that, if you are managing more than a couple of processes and contracts, tremendous efficiency is gained when you include a direct relationship between a communication, document, record and a process or contract. Often the ID’s are generated manually by looking at the last number used and adding one, but this can result in duplications through accidentally re-entering the same number and potential inconsistencies through data entry errors. You may mean to type CAT-112 and instead you type CAT-121. Nine numbers have been skipped, which can be confusing, and you may have actually recorded CAT-112 on all your documents and folders. So in this blog we’ll look at a method in our Advanced Excel Contracts Manager to automatically generate and ID using Excel and a bit of VBA.

Advanced Excel Contract Manager – Protect Your Data

It is all well to create a complex list of data, but reviewing, adding and maintaining records in the Excel table format when there are more than a few fields quickly becomes slow and unreliable. End users will complain about having to maintain so many fields, managers will want the data displayed as different forms of information and administrators will quickly tire of trying to fix the errors introduced through poor data entry and accidental deletions. This is where the benefit of the Advanced Excel Contract Manager solution in separating access to and maintenance of the data from the raw data sheet delivers a tremendous advantage over basic spreadsheet tables.

Using Array Variable in Excel VBA to Boost Performance

The array variable provides an opportunity to significantly boost the performance of Excel in processing large data sets and they are surprisingly easy to use. In a recent project, I implemented an array variable and allowed the code run nearly 10 times faster. If you need to manipulate large data sets and your code is running slower than you would like, take a look at this solution.