Large RFx
Today, I thought I would start a series of a few posts regarding running a “large” RFx in E-Sourcing. A few years ago, I worked with an E-Sourcing customer that used E-Sourcing to solicit bids from around 250 suppliers for a very large number of products. I would actually characterize the objective of the RFx as a “catalog refresh” - the E-Sourcing customer required pricing updates from all of their suppliers for a number of products. In some cases, the supplier provided just a few products; in other cases, the supplier provided thousands of products.
In addition to requiring price updates from the suppliers, the customer also needed to use E-Sourcing to negotiate updated terms and conditions for their contract.
Overall, this scenario presented a very interesting use-case for E-Sourcing: to negotiate contract terms and conditions and follow that negotiation with solicitation of updated pricing from suppliers.
After much thought and analysis, we decided to structure the “event” as follows. We started by creating a basic E-Sourcing RFI. The purpose of the RFI was to negotiate the contract terms and conditions as well as to solicit some other information from the suppliers. The RFI was a very basic RFx in E-Sourcing: it consisted of only a few questions. One of the questions we defined was an “attachment question” - the purpose of this question was to have the suppliers upload a red-lined version of the draft contract terms and conditions, which were provided to the supplier as an attachment published by the E-Sourcing customer. This single RFI was published to the 250 suppliers.
Due to the large number suppliers participating in the RFx, we allocated three months to process the results and complete the contract negotiations.
Next week I will write about how we collected the updated pricing from the suppliers.