Is everything in business still moving at the hyperscale speed? Or is it just in Procurement where it feels this way!

Well, for us February and March were about two things; One, making it easier for your company to procure directly from trusted suppliers (keeping up with your speed 🙂 and two, listening to your suggestions and improving the experience of what is already on the system.

As usual, here’s our monthly note on the updates we have been able to provide you with:

1. Price Lists, Framework Agreements & Direct Purchases

We have rolled out a solution that will manage and track the process of directly issuing Purchase Orders to the suppliers. This is especially important for those direct and/or repeat purchases from a supplier where you don’t need to have multiple quotations provided, just an acceptance of the LPO from the selected Supplier.

It works in three simple steps:

• Request for Supplier Price Lists: Agreed on a Price List with your suppliers and ‘Lock-in’ the cost for a specified period of time.
• Create Purchase Lists: As and when needed, create a Purchase List based on the items you want to procure.
• Generate & Issue Purchase Orders (POs): Using the Purchase List, generate a Purchase Order (with approvals where needed) and get this sent directly to the Supplier to confirm receipt and willingness to supply within the set terms.

2. Your Questions, Feedback and Suggestions Addressed

After finalising on the Direct Purchases and Supplier Price Lists module, we took a step back and spent a couple of weeks to address your questions and feedback. We dedicated time and went through each of your suggestions and made some updates to the system.

Here are a few key ones we can highlight today:

Q: Shouldn’t it be possible to invite my Suppliers as I add to them to the SRM? I don’t understand why I have to wait until I have an RFQ to publish first.

A: Direct Invite of Suppliers – Previously, your Suppliers would get invited to register on Scale only when you have an RFQ published and shared with them. We have changed this such that the moment you add a Supplier on your SRM, you can invite them to register with you so that you are ready to directly interact with them across all the other modules.

Q: How can I get access to detailed list of all the Suppliers I have on Scale?

A: Download of Supplier List – For reporting or audit purposes, you can now access the list of suppliers in your SRM by extracting an Excel Sheet. As requested, we have included the categories and status of the suppliers as some of the details in Excel sheet.

Q: What happens if there are updates that need to be created on a Request for Quotation that is actively receiving responses from suppliers?

A: Addendums and additional Instructions to Bidders – You can now upload additional documents to an Active RFQ and all the suppliers who have engaged with it with get a notification on the update.

Q: What if, for some unexplained (strange, out of this world) reason you have published an RFQ and it fails to get even a single bid submission?

A: Re-Issuing of RFQs – You now have the ability to review to adjust the details and republish the same RFQ. This allows for a faster process to publishing by just correcting/updating specific items in the RFQ instead having to start from scratch.

That’s it for now! Finally, your relationship with your Suppliers is what drives Scale. It’s at the core of what we are trying to achieve with what we are building and we are happy to hear from you what you feel we can do to improve this.

Book a live demo, give us a call or email us on anything you think we can improve or include to enable you work better and achieve your procurement KPIs for 2023.