The Why: The Strategic Impact of Purchasing
- Former user (Deleted)
With our world changing faster every day, purchasing and contract management are more important than ever. After all, finding and contracting the right suppliers is what enables an organisation to most effectively meet its goals and ambitions. Organisations are now recognising the increased strategic value of purchasing. They know that making the right choices now reduces the risk of challenging problems years down the road.
In order to meet the ever-increasing purchasing needs of a modern organisation, well structured purchasing and contract management processes are critical. It is essential to make use of an organisation’s knowledge, and to make decisions based on data. Finding the right products or services at the right time, in a legitimate way, is not something you do alone. It is a continuous, collaborative process.
Mercell helps to get most value from your work, your organisation, and from the market.
Move from facilitating to directing
Our mission: To create value by combining supply and demand in a smart, structured way - enabling more effective agreements and relationships.
Mercell is the market leader in digital tendering. We’ve offered the most innovative procurement and contract management platform for both public and private organisations for 20 years.
Our software solution creates a structure to organise otherwise fragmented data and processes. This enables purchasing to manage the entire Source-to-Contract process in one robust environment, empowering buyers and contract managers to take up a strategic position within the organisation.
We believe in user-friendly software that seamlessly facilitates the process, integrates with other systems, and converts data into management and decision- making information. Our solution also enable decentralised purchasing. Organisations choosing Mercell get an intuitive tool that can be tailored to the complexity of any procurement process in any organisation.
In this way we offer a unique level of control, taking purchasing, and thus your organisation as a whole, to a higher level.
Intake Management
As a buyer you are not always the most visible within your organisation and you are not always brought into the purchasing process at the proper time. You may also often be working with incomplete information. In combination, this can lead to improper or even illegal purchases taking place.
As a purchasing department you want to have a grip on all purchasing needs within your organisation. You want to be able to advise and support. You know best how to get the most value out of the market.
Intake management is the portal from your colleagues to purchasing. It asks the right questions in a user-friendly way to map out purchasing needs. Each purchasing need is therefore always fully described, allowing you to safeguard the purchasing policy and deliver maximum added value to your organisation.
Sourcing & Tendering
Procurement is a complex and time-consuming process - especially when it takes place entirely via e-mail and using tools like Word and Excel.
As a buyer, you therefore spend a lot of your time organising the process, instead of creating value for your internal customers. Moreover, ‘paper’ processes are prone to errors for suppliers and do not guarantee the desired transparency.
As a buyer you want to be optimally supported in
the purchasing process. You want to be able to easily draw up specifications with colleagues. The Memorandum of Information should be created
with a simple, digital process. You want to receive offers in a structured way, automatically distribute evaluations to colleagues, and finally you want to be able to award and reject offers simply and with good reasons. In short, you want digital support from A to Z during the entire purchasing process.
By structuring the process and the data surrounding the tender, Mercell creates new information. This provides new insights that would otherwise remain hidden in documents, emails and spreadsheets. This makes comparing, selecting and awarding the most economically advantageous tenderer a lot easier.
Contract Management
Contracting new suppliers is not the end of the process, it is just the start. Organisations can quickly have thousands of contracts, and that number rapidly grows. Research shows that about 10% of all contracts go missing. Commonly, there is also an insufficient understanding of the intended contract objectives, which means that contracts do not deliver what is expected of them.
As a contract manager you want to have a grip on contracts and you want to be in control of realising intended contract objectives. This can save you between 5% and 10% of the contract value.
Mercell allows contract managers to unambiguously and transparently record all agreements with suppliers, signed contracts, and any contract changes. This allows managers to proactively manage and focus on realising the intended contract value and manage the relationship.
Supplier Relationship Management
As a supplier manager it is sometimes difficult to find all the relevant information about your suppliers. What contracts do I have with this supplier? In which tenders did they participate? How is their performance? How are they doing compared to the other framework contractors?
These are all questions that you want to be able to answer easily but whose answers are often spread throughout the organisation.
To be able to focus on realising objectives and managing relationships, as a supplier manager you want to have all data immediately available, without having to worry about whether it is up to date. You also don’t want to manage everything yourself, but rather work collaboratively with your supplier.
With Mercell you have a 360-degree overview of every supplier at the touch of a button. It provides insight into contracts, performance, compliance, and much more. You can request documents via Mercell and suppliers can manage their data themselves. This saves time and allows both of you to focus on maximising outcomes.
Performance Surveys
During the purchasing and contracting process, all kinds of agreements and promises are made regarding the performance to be delivered. As a buyer or contract manager you want to be able to objectively assess suppliers based on the agreed KPIs. In addition, it is important to know exactly how the stakeholders feel about the actual performance delivered.
Measuring performance provides valuable input for discussions with suppliers and internal stakeholders. As a result, you are in control and you have all the data you need to address supplier challenges and adjust agreements.
Mercell makes it possible to measure and record the performance of suppliers and contracts. This process is fully digital and automatically displays the scores per KPI, so that you can set out actions and inform stakeholders based on the results. Performance measurement provides valuable input for contract and supplier managers.