Sourcing Best Practices

Enabling New Vendors – When an entity is ready to begin developing their bids, it is recommended that the entity communicate to the vendor community that they are moving to ESM Solutions for online sourcing. We have a standard Vendor Letter template that each customer can modify and send out as an E-mail or hard copy letter.

Vendors can register through the link on our web page. We recommend they contact the customer once they have registered to be put on the invitation list when appropriate.

Creating Distribution Lists – When defining your distribution lists, the customer has a great deal of flexibility in creating these groups of vendors. Most often, customers will group their lists by category, NIGP code. This will allow them to publish any solicitation to that group if it is within that category. For example, we may have a list categorized as Custodial Suppliers. I can use this list whether I am publishing my bid/quote for Mops or Brooms. As long as the list is categorized appropriately, I can leverage it over and over again.

Centralized or Distributed Quotes - There are 2 Common practices we see within organizations:

1. Requester completes a paper or e-mail request and sends it to the purchasing department
2. The buyer will retrieve 3 quotes, select the best product (based on knowledge) and communicate the Price and Vendor information back to the requester
3. Requester will initiate a new requisition with Price and Vendor to be approved and purchased.

Or

1. Requester calls 3 vendors of their choice
2. Requester will initiate a new requisition with Price and Vendor to be approved and purchased.

If scenario one exits, common issues are:

1. Only 3 Vendors are used – which may not give the best price
2. Quoting process goes through one resource.
3. Turnaround time may be lengthy
4. Quote Information from Requester can be incomplete, add to turnaround time and become frustrating to the buyer

If scenario two exists, common issues are:

1. It is difficult to know whether the Requester really submitted 3 quote requests
2. Best price may not have been reached

When implementing easyQuote, the process we have seen the following model as being very successful;

1. Delegate the ability to create and publish quotes to the requester community.
2. Purchasing provides Standard Vendor lists that can contain more than 3 vendors
3. Awarding can be completed by Purchasing
4. If entity is using easyPurchase, the Quote can then be converted into a requisition for the original requester to submit for approval.
5. If the items can be used by others in the organization, a catalog can also be created in easyPurchase that anyone can take advantage of without having to their own quote