Transform Procurement

How to bring negotiation back into your procurements without [pissing off everyone].

If you want to increase supplier transparency, reduce costs, and improve your supply chain maturity, an e-Auction program is the answer. E-Auctions have a bad reputation because there are thousands of ways to do them wrong and only a few ways to do them right.

This book is your guide to thoughtfully implementing or expanding your e-Auction program in a way that brings value to your business. It will guide you through the order to gather buy-in (executives are first, but who is second?), resources needed, major decision points, supplier management, responses to common supplier questions, process steps, and how to e-Auction traditionally "unauctionable" categories. In addition, this book includes guidelines on writing a good scope of work with detailed examples, process maps, and sample supplier communications to smooth your path through implementation.

Topics covered:

• Benefits of e-Auctions for both buyer and supplier
• Timeline a typical e-Auction adds to the process (spoiler alert: it's a couple of days!)
• Psychology of e-Auctions
• Building an e-Auction team
• Setting ceilings, bid decrements, reserves, overtime, and tie rules
• Determining exemptions to e-Auction by category (e-Auctions are not just for materials!)
• Measuring and reporting metrics
• Training suppliers while keeping or strengthening relationships
• Writing bid criteria and a solid scope of work
• Calculating bid transformations and including supplier transition costs
• Fitting hourly rates, project components, creative services, and staff augmentation bids into your e-Auction strategy
• Running single supplier e-Auctions (when and why would you do so?)

You may have either had an experience with e-Auctions or heard about them previously, but this book is here to tell you all those rumors don't have to be true. While e-Auctions were rapidly adopted and then abandoned in the early 2000s, we've learned a few things since then. They don't have to be a race to the bottom or an opaque way to just squeeze margins from suppliers. They can instead be a fair approach to allowing suppliers to improve their value and partnership to the business and get immediate market feedback. If you have been tasked with finding better value and more cost savings with less time and fewer resources, this book is for you.

You'll go from accepting your suppliers' first price to negotiating value with every bid.

You'll go from only negotiating a few of your bids to negotiating all of them.

You'll dramatically expand your negotiation toolset.