New Release – Sourcing Dojo Advanced Lot Multi-Stage RFQs

We are delighted to bring Multi-Stage Quotations to our Advanced Lot sourcing functionality.

For complex projects, with complex specifications, advanced lots are a fantastic way to gather detailed quotations from your supply-chain. It can be difficult to push these RFQs forward to a full auction due to the size of the required submission. In this case, Multi-Stage RFQs are an effective way of generating additional savings, and clarifications, without the use of an auction.

Proceeding to an Advanced Lot MSRFQ

Requirements change, no matter how planned out a project may be, there is always scope for dynamic improvement or adjustment. We have developed our tools with this viewpoint in mind, and MSRFQs are no different. As with auctions, instead of declaring up-front that the event will proceed in this way, users can start with a single-round RFQ and react to the received bids by adding another round after the fact.

With the first round of RFQ completed, an additional option will be shown on the RFQ tab for ‘Add another Round’.

On click you can determine the rules of the new round, and the participants you want to take forward

Round Settings

When adding an additional round to the event there are three settings available.

The deadline behaves as for the original RFQ round, and can initially be blank to allow for flexibility based on when responses are received. It can be updated from the overview tab up until it passes, at which time proxy bidding should be utilised or another round added.

By allowing bids to increase specifications can be refined between rounds, and clarified with suppliers, to ensure that an accurate bid can be provided within the new round. If you are satisfied that the requirements have not changed you can leave this unchecked to ensure the participants’ bids must improve.

Finally, you can show the bids from the previous round to the suppliers. For example, when creating round 3, by setting this option to true, the participants from the last round can see how they ranked at the end of round 2. This can be useful to encourage competition between suppliers without moving to an auction.

Adding and Removing Participants

The final options within the new round window are for adding and removing participants from the event.

Additional participants can be added to the event at any time via edit mode and the suppliers will be brought into the currently open RFQ round, be that the original bids or after the event has become multi-stage. Meaning you could go out to new suppliers for a ‘round 1’ bid, adding in established suppliers at a later stage.

The opposite process is also available, as between rounds the suppliers can be ‘dropped’ by unchecking the box next to them in the grid. This can be useful to narrow down the bids and make it easier to focus on the comparisons. To aid with this decision the participant names can be clicked for more information on their bids, and the total bids amount is shown.

These dropped suppliers will lose access to the event, but can be added back in a later round, as they will be available on the new round settings.

Viewing Rounds

Once your event has multiple rounds, you will see different viewing options within the RFQ tab.

By using the drop-down on the right, you can review only the bids from a certain round, be that ongoing or completed. This is good to see how your event has progressed since it first went live.

The alternative is to click on ‘Best Overall’ showing the most recent bid from each supplier. This is likely to be your go-to, as this is the direct comparison required to choose a supplier.

The bid download from the event has also been updated to reflect the UI within the application; with a tab for each round and the final bids from each participant.