For creating and managing RFPs, sourcing and procurement managers are choosing the traditional approach of working closely with business stakeholders, suppliers and collaborating over emails, Excel, and Word files. The inboxes of procurement managers are cluttered with unread emails from all suppliers and RFP stakeholders resulting in a lack of collaboration with delayed responses.

Is there a better way to change the traditional procurement operational approach so that the team can deliver faster RFx-to-award cycle time with effective supplier evaluation criteria?

We will look at how to implement successful RFP operations with spend visibility on the ServiceNow platform with RFPflow. Over the past decade, e-procurement has revolutionized the strategic sourcing operations where RFPs act as a major tactical benefit to procurement teams by sourcing the right product at the right price. With the digital transformation catalysts in place, RFPs are undergoing massive change, right from creating RFP questions to reviewing potential vendor responses, searching for the perfect supplier to help you streamline strategic sourcing.

In order to implement successful RFP operations, the sourcing teams try to collate all responses into a single repository and work on document management systems (share-points), plus they track all the procurement activities using Excel and set reminders to follow-up with stakeholders and suppliers. They do not have clear procurement evaluation criteria, creating havoc during the supplier evaluation phase.

The Solution: RFPflow on ServiceNow Digital Workflow Platform

Managing your RFPs on ServiceNow can streamline your strategic procurement processes and enable a Source-to-Contract suite within an organization. This will help to improve integration, faster RFx-to-award cycle time, and achieve budgeted savings.

1. Centralized Full-text Searchable Document Repository: Using ServiceNow, the procurement team can prepare a document repository of legacy RFPs and question libraries. The Google-like search functionality in ServiceNow provides instant access to legacy RFPs and sectional supplier questions.
2. Enterprise Integrations: ServiceNow offers an integration hub to help you address business problems faster by integrating valuable enterprise apps, tools, and resources from inside and outside the enterprise. For example, the integration platform is powerful enough to extracts all changes from an email client or Microsoft Office and creates an audit trail for your RFP management process. This audit trail will ensure that procurement teams are compliant with the regulatory system without major headaches.
3. Improves Employee Productivity: With service management software like ServiceNow, employees do not spend valuable time waiting for approvals and responses. Instead, ServiceNow understands and automates routine workflow tasks to notify the correct personnel and sometimes even fix the simple problems before they can create delays. Through workflow automation, ServiceNow can negate wait times and interruptions. Moreover, the user interface is so simple that the Procurement team and suppliers do not have to be re-trained with the software.
4. Enterprise-grade Security: Every year ServiceNow is rigorously audited by independent third-party companies and government bodies to prove that we comply with various global and regional standards. ServiceNow ensures that the data is secure at all times as per different standards across industries and geographies. The applications built on ServiceNow also automatically adhere to one of the broadest portfolios of industry standards and comply with new digital privacy and safety mandates as they evolve.