Procurement professionals do and will continue to play a pivotal role in ensuring that many businesses survive the Covid-19 crisis.

Whilst many companies have entered a hibernation phase as consumer spend drops to an all-time low, the road to recovery for many businesses will bring with it many new challenges and difficult decisions. With this reduced demand, many organisations will need to find ways to reduce costs and drive further value from within the supply chain in an attempt to avoid redundancies.

At Market Dojo, we have already seen a dramatic increase in the customer use of our tools with our number of users doubling in the last few months. We believe that our combination of easy-to-use and on-demand features has allowed many procurement professionals or those involved in tenders to successfully work virtually from home.

To help procurement professionals get the most out of their activities, we’ve listed a few of the top areas we believe that they can find value in online tools:

• Sending questionnaires to their suppliers to better understand upcoming risks. This not only refers to tier 1 suppliers but the whole supply chain
• Helping procurement teams work virtually by keeping information in the cloud and accessible to all. This applies to everything from supplier chats, through to contracts, insurance documents, and general tenders
• Managing costs and improving options. By using on-demand eSourcing applications, more suppliers can be easily involved in tenders and most importantly, giving clients more options.
• Negotiation through multi-stage RFQ’s and auctions. Auctions have not been the go-to tool at a time when supplier relationships are critical but they have been successful when suppliers have used the crisis to raise costs. Moving forward we are seeing them being used more [such as PPE] and we expect this trend to continue. Multi-stage RFQ’s also act as a lite touch process to reduce costs easily.

Market Dojo along with many other procurement organisations, has tried to offer best practice advice for procurement in this crisis. We firmly believe that procurement is going to be critical for the survival of many businesses as we enter recovery, however, if you have any questions or want to know how we can help, get in touch with us here.

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