Your Expense Category Manager Doesn’t Use Standardized Bid Response Templates To Ensure That All Prospective Vendors’ Offerings Can Be Easily Compared On A Like-For-Like (Apples To Apples) Basis

When an expense category manager requests bids from six or more vendors, the request packet includes detailed criteria needed to fulfill their product/service requirements.

The bid responses are formatted by the vendors in the manner that each vendor has typically used in the past to respond to bids.

The challenge is that each format is different in appearance and structure, which means that the expense category manager has to glean information from six or more bid responses and try to compare them.

Not an easy task! The way the vendor’s information is presented is different in each bid response as well as the product/service and vendor support being offered.

The goal is to determine which bid response provides the best value (including pricing, product/service quality, and vendor support) to your company. With multiple components to compare from multiple vendors, there are many moving parts.

The comparison process is detailed and time-consuming. This could be one of the reasons that thorough expense category reviews aren’t undertaken more often.

After being personally involved in unstructured bid response comparisons for my clients, I began to think about how I could improve this mind-numbing process.

After evaluating how bid responses were being reviewed, I realized that the “fix” needed to be on the front end. Once the bid responses were received in different formats and structures, it was too late to streamline the process.

I decided to create templates that explained the requirements (and that could be used again and again) as well as a bid response template. The bid response template standardized the vendors’ responses so that they were rather easy to compare.

The result was bid response comparison times being reduced by 91% as well as being more accurate because of the streamlined process.

Without standardized bid response templates, thoroughly analyzing an expense category is harder, more complex, more time-consuming, and less accurate.

Next week…Reason # 19