Procurement has been left behind in the digital revolution. We had no idea to what extent until we started participating in procurement as suppliers many years ago.

Imagine ten suppliers responded to this tender and provided similarly long tender responses. Forget for a second how long it took the suppliers to put together these responses.

If you have ten suppliers providing two manual copies of bid responses, each over 1,500 pages long; how long do you think it will take the evaluators to peruse through and evaluate every page?

How many errors are they likely to make in the evaluation?

Where do they store these responses?

How do they generate evaluation reports?

What will be the turnaround time for this tender, and the next and the next?

Building Scale was a labour of love for us as suppliers many years ago. But it increasingly became a labour of need.

Introducing Scale for Procurement Entities

In building Scale Procure, we started by speaking to the people we were building for, Procurement Officers and Chief Financial Officers. We met with over 60 people in a span of a month and took in what they had to tell us regarding the failures of their current systems and processes and most importantly, what the ideal solution for them would look like.

That is how we ended up building the Scale you are about to see.

The Dashboard

We have built a simple and intuitive dashboard that tells procurement officers what needs action at a glance.

Digital RFQ Process

We have reduced the time it takes to create an RFQ by over 90%. Once fully set up, creating an RFQ through Scale is a breeze. We have four simple steps in this process, three of which can be set up and saved during the first RFQ and reused in perpetuity. These are:

• Request Items – where you can select the goods and services you are procuring from your internal catalogue.
• Instructions to bidders – where you can send your organisation’s policies and codes of conduct to bidders.
• Supplier Eligibility Checklist – where you can select which accompanying documents you need suppliers to provide.
• Publishing – where you can select whether it is an open or restricted tender, in which case, you can choose which category of your suppliers you will send out the bid to.

Tender Evaluation and Awarding

To ease the weight on procurement officers, the tenders evaluators have an easy time clicking and evaluating the suppliers who have responded and are even made aware of who the lowest bidders are. You can conduct both mandatory and financial evaluations for RFQs on this page.

Winning suppliers will get an email and an in-app notification that they won, while the losing suppliers will receive the same but with reasons why they lost.

Generating Purchase Orders

Once you have awarded a supplier a tender, you can easily generate a Local Purchase Order (LPO), or if you have your own system for generating LPOs, you can upload the LPO that will get emailed to the supplier.

Invoices by Suppliers

We have also provided suppliers with a module for generating invoices against the LPOs you sent them. They can generate partial or complete invoices with this module. We realised that buyers and suppliers fight a lot about invoicing and by making this available, we are enabling better statements of account.

Orders and Invoices

This is where procurement officers and financial managers have full visibility over the contracting process. It is an action-based page that keeps you focused on what matters most. We covered this in more detail on a previous article – Purchase Orders, Invoices, Suppliers…plus enhanced Dashboards!

Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)

Procuring entities have for years struggled with managing their suppliers. We have provided an SRM through which they can onboard and manage their relationships with suppliers.

Supplier Category Management

Category management is how most procuring entities structure their suppliers. We have built a robust category management tool that enables procuring entities to create various groups and categories and onboard their suppliers accordingly.

Catalogue Management

We have provided procuring entities with a robust catalogue management tool that allows them to enter the descriptions, price estimates, pictures and categories. Even better is the price estimates are tracked and updated with every tender awarded.

Roles, Permissions and User Management

We have provided procuring entities with a way to create roles and set permissions against those roles to ensure that users who are onboarded have access to only the modules they are permitted to view or edit.

Supplier Portal – Scale Supply

We have provided suppliers with their own portal, similar to procuring entities, where they can manage all their documents, respond to tenders from any procuring entities, generate invoices, generate delivery notes and discover tender opportunities.

Evaluation/Assessment Reports

We all know how much it sucks to have to do reports about everything. With Scale, with a click of a button, you can generate beautiful reports for every tender, from initiation to completion, including all the approvals.

Scale Tenders Widget

We have developed a Tenders Widget that Procuring Entities can easily embed on their websites. This widget will alert suppliers who visit their websites or the Scale website about the tenders that the procuring entity has open at that point in time.

I haven’t even mentioned that Scale provides you with the best user experience bar none.

And we are just getting started… Join us this 2023 and let’s build together.