Purchasing Software, Procurement Solutions, Self-Service Procurement Solutions

The Puridiom Bid Board Process allows your supplier to search and review information on procurement opportunities. Any supplier can browse and view unrestricted solicitations (RFPs, RFIs, and others) by logging into the Bid Board as a “guest.” In order to bid on any solicitation, a supplier must complete a registration/pre-qualification process. To become a Qualified supplier and receive access to view and bid on restricted solicitations, the completed information must be approved by an authorized representative. Suppliers can find solicitations by using a comprehensive search engine with defined criteria.

A dynamic solicitation process incorporates any variety of solicitations which can be posted and made available on your Bid Board website for supplier’s receipt and response. You control what solicitations are posted, which ones can be downloaded, and the suppliers that are authorized to view or bid against them.

The intuitive tool allows the agent to post solicitations to be made available to all suppliers or restricted based on commodity code selection, vendor ID selection, or other pre-defined selection criteria. A notification via email can be automatically generated to all or a subset of suppliers to announce activities such as the release of the solicitation or changes to the solicitation. A posted solicitation may be reviewed by the suppliers who can download the RFx document and all attachments to provide a response.

This process is further enhanced, giving you the option to select an online bid process allowing suppliers to post their bids directly on the your website. Bids are captured by Puridiom’s Bid Board portal in a secure environment and may then be analyzed by the procurement agent using a spreadsheet format produced by Puridiom for auto-bid tabulation and analysis to reduce supplier selection process cycle time.

Solicitations may be created for any type of items, materials, inventories, services, projects and so on. These bid items can be created from pre-approved, managed catalogs, internal or supplier-managed inventory, or from free-form entry by the soliciting agent. Document Management allows the agent to attach other related information such as plans, drawings, specifications, schedules, addenda, and announcements with the solicitation. These documents can be in a variety of formats ranging from Word and Excel to PDF to images/AutoCADD drawings.

Suppliers can log in to Puridiom’s Bid Board with an authorized user id and password or as a ‘guest’. Registered suppliers can search for solicitations matching their commodities/ services automatically, while guests can provide this information as part of the search criteria. Based on the supplier’s access and solicitation restrictions, the supplier can select a solicitation to review and/or place a bid. If available, they can download a PDF of the solicitation along with any other documents associated with the solicitation.

For ‘line item’ bids, suppliers enter a unit price bid for each item listed on the solicitation or can select “No Bid,” “No Charge,” “Not Separately Priced,” “See Notes”. Notes can be entered for each item or for the overall solicitation. If there are questions posted as part of the solicitation, the supplier must first respond to the questions before submitting bids. When updating bids, suppliers are not allowed to increase/decrease their previously submitted bid for any item. For open auctions, the supplier has the option to be notified via email if other bids are placed changing their status from the lowest/highest bidder, depending on the type of auction (Forward or Reverse).

For bids requiring more elaborate responses, Puridiom provides for and maintains the integrity and security of received solicitations through its pre-defined, customized processes. Suppliers have access to their own bid documents to the extent allowed by you. This can include no access to submitted bids, inquire-only access to submitted bids, or the ability to delete and/or resubmit a submitted bid if it is prior to the bid due date and time. Internally, your personnel, based upon their security privileges within Puridiom, can have access to all bids prior to the bid due date and time or only after the bid is closed.

All submitted bids and related documents are maintained within Puridiom and cannot be viewed or accessed by other suppliers or unauthorized personnel. Even on Open Auctions where a notification of the lowest/highest bid is displayed for each supplier, the supplier will not know who submitted the lowest/highest bid. They will only know if they are the lowest/highest bidder. Additionally, all bid submissions are logged for auditing and security purposes

Puridiom uses a spreadsheet format for bid analysis and evaluation. The purchasing agent may choose a dynamic evaluation for comparison between bidders or may select a single supplier’s response for evaluation. The bid tabulation may be printed or displayed. It is stored in Puridiom for future reference.

Additional capabilities include scoring of evaluation questions which will allow buyers to specify weights for each evaluation question in order to give a score for suppliers based on their response and bid ranking, providing buyers with the option to indicate position in the bid for suppliers, and lowest/highest bid notification options. Options also include the indication of individual bid ranking, bid rankings for all bidders, and rank bids by overall bid total or item bid if desired by you.

The entire solicitation process is seamlessly integrated with Puridiom’s other modules including the requisition, purchasing, and supplier management processes. This provides for easy selection of qualified suppliers, line item consolidation from requisitions to solicitation to purchase order/award.