How eSourcing Can Improve Your Business

Strong and successful procurement strategies need to include an element of continuous improvement. We, as procurement professionals, are always looking for ways to add value, cut costs and save time. 

With that in mind, this learning resource explores how you can take the tenders you’re currently running by email, and use sourcing to make them more cost-effective, valuable and useful for your business.

Why Improve Your Business with eSourcing?

Procurement and sourcing may not be the first port of call when it comes to improving business processes, but they should never be discounted while on your path to total business optimisation. 

eSourcing presents a series of powerful benefits for your business, and you can achieve all these through upgrading to e-sourcing software such as Market Dojo Sourcing. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how eSourcing works, we have plenty more resources available for you. In this learning resource though, we’re going to cover exactly what kind of improvements you can be expected to see if you do decide to incorporate eSourcing into your procurement systems.

How eSourcing Will Improve Your Business Growth Potential

Streamline Your Procurement Process

eSourcing is designed to improve your procurement management process by changing the way you run sourcing events. eSourcing allows you to take your procurement efforts onto an online platform, where you can run digital events including RFX and eAuctions.

Through a centralised system, accessible across teams and departments, procurement can define buying criteria, invite suppliers to tender, create sourcing events and select your new suppliers. All your procurement data is housed in a single place, making it easy for your teams to make choices, compare options, optimise their workflow and source the best opportunities.

Improve Your Supplier Relationships

As a digital system, eSourcing offers a range of support and accessibility unavailable to procurement teams and the suppliers who are working with legacy solutions like spreadsheet management and email file sharing for their sourcing. 

All the data needed is at your fingertips, whenever an eSourcing platform is accessed. This makes everyone’s lives easier, reducing administrative load and improving clarity for the contract bidding objectives. Supplier onboarding solutions will further streamline your process reducing time spent onboarding new suppliers and ensuring compliance and  better risk management.

Market Dojo’s solutions are consistently rated easy to use and intuitive by our customers and their suppliers, which can mean you develop stronger, healthier relationships with suppliers”making it easier to scale and grow with the business needs.

Keep Your Supply Chain Compliant

eSourcing makes the process of risk management and compliance checks simple. As part of your sourcing events and supplier procurement process, you can include digital requests for information that require suppliers to provide documentation proving they are compliant with the regulations that apply within your supply chain. 

These could be health and safety procedures, data management policies, environmental certifications, etc. 

You can simply add pre qualifications as a gateway to your sourcing opportunities. If suppliers fail to provide the correct compliance documents and assurances, they are unable to take part in your tender. 

Improve Transparency and Access Better Offers

eSourcing allows you to extend your procurement process to include reverse eAuctions, which”unlike forward auctions that see bids on a product or service increase until somebody wins the lot”sees bids gradually lower until the best opportunity is secured.

Reverse auctions are common in procurement, but reverse eAuctions take this process online. This has an important benefit of increased transparency of the sourcing event, which in turn actually increases your chances of better offers through higher interaction.

Your reverse eAuction runs as a live sourcing event. For example, if you’re running a ranked sourcing event, when suppliers bid, they can see how they rank in comparison to their competition for each lot/line item. This offers suppliers vital market intelligence, without giving away the lead bid value.

Using this format, suppliers have better opportunities to enhance their bid and win your business, but provides you with the chance to increase the competitive nature of your sourcing event, and reach the true market price.

To learn more about eAuctions, get our free resource Beginners Guide to Reverse Auctions.

Market Dojo offers powerful, on-demand eSourcing and eProcurement tools to optimise your supply chain. Get in touch with our team and arrange your personalised demo!