Need Some New Equipment? Then You Better Get that Financing APPROVEd!

Ten years ago, SI was one of the first sites to cover KWIPPED, which was one of the first, and now likely the oldest (and biggest), marketplace for equipment rental procurement for all your equipment rental needs. Launched to help businesses with idle equipment and equipment rental agencies connect with businesses that needed to rent equipment for the short to long term, it served a niche in complex and project procurement that the major procurement platforms weren’t (and still aren’t) solving.

It works well, and worked well since day one as it grew quite fast, and while it met a lot of the market needs, it didn’t solve all of the market problems that were out there in equipment procurement for precise/complex projects and one-time acquisitions. Namely:

  • Some buyers wanted to rent to own, but suppliers weren’t (or couldn’t afford to be) offering that
  • Some buyers wanted to lease, or lease to own, for long periods of time, but needed up front financing (which suppliers couldn’t afford)
  • Some suppliers wanted to help buyers get financing, but they could only recommend a few lenders, who were often:
    • too strict in their lending criteria
    • too costly with their rates
    • too slow, and buyers walked away
  • Some suppliers didn’t like the loss of visibility into, or control, of the sales process with current lending processes (send the buyer away to a third-party lender and hope she comes back)
  • Many lenders didn’t like random referrals they were unlikely to ever approve (which wasted their time), or the spray and pray tactics savvier buyers who knew how to find options would use (which wasted their time)

In other words, buyers and suppliers wanted financing options so they could lease to own (or even buy outright), but neither of them liked the current application and approval process, and lenders wanted an easier, more efficient way, to get requests relevant to their lending business, so they could waste less time in approvals and more on hitting their lending targets (because they need to lend to make money).

Being techies, the founders of KWIPPED, who started off by making introductions to potential lenders on behalf of suppliers they knew well and buyers who asked, realized there had to be a better way to solve this problem, because forcing buyers to go offline and deal with a lender through old-school fax and email just wasn’t a good experience for anyone. They realized that there should be a platform like Lendgo (that could obtain, and compare, personal mortgages and refinancing options side-by-side), but for business equipment financing and leasing, and, more importantly, one that meets the need of all three parties, not just the buyer or lender.

So that’s what they set out to do, and they do it through the APPROVE marketplace (which can be accessed through the KWIPPED platform, the seller’s website, or even a third-party marketplace through a plug-in).
In KWIPPED, or a supported supplier marketplace, when a buyer brings up a listing, they will see the buy-it-now price, the rental price, and the estimated financing price (per month) based on the equipment type and a predictive model based on a database of over 75,000 financing applications and 3+ responses to each (which allows them to predict, with high accuracy, the estimated financing for that item for a buyer with average or better credit rating).

To start a financing application, it’s a 60-second process for the buyer who just needs to fill in some basic details to kick the process off. At this point, the request will be routed to a supplier’s financing (assistance) department if they have one, or the APPROVE financing team who will contact the buyer for any specific information required to make a lending application, get clarity on their needs, augment the application with the right data in the right language to optimize clarity and success with the lenders, and then, when the application is ready, kick off the automatic application process in the system.

Unlike many of these marketplace financing/mortgage/insurance platforms, the APPROVE platform is not a spray-and-pray platform or one that relies on buyer expertise to build a short list of potential lenders to send the application to. Once all the information has been collected, they use a predictive (machine learning) model that has been trained on this data set of over 75,000 financing requests, over 300,0000 quotes, and third-party risk and financial data on the buyers and sellers to predict which vendors will approve the financing and what the rates will be, and then send it to the top 3 vendors with the lowest predicted rates and a high chance of approval. If one or more of these vendors denies, it will continue down the list of potential lenders (who are predicted to charge higher rates and/or have a lower chance of approval) until it gets 3 quotes for the buyer. And, if the financier on the APPROVE or seller team happens to know that a particular lender is more or less likely to approve a specific request based on experience, they can override the rankings and issue the request direct to the lender (but generally the platform works quite well and it’s best to let it work its predictive model).

This is a very important differentiation. You don’t want to send a financing request to just any lender because:

  • some very risk averse lenders will only approve the top top tier of buyers (the cream of the crop that could probably afford to buy outright), and you’re just wasting your time
  • some less risk averse lenders will lend to anyone, who want to pay exorbitant interest rates that are 2X to 3X prime (and should only be a last resort)
  • some lenders specialize in certain industries and equipment types, and don’t want to lend outside their domain of expertise
  • etc.

This means if you don’t target the financing applications properly, you are going to get a lot of lender rejections or a lot of bad offers that the buyer won’t accept, leading to a lot of wasted time on all parties (and platform mistrust). Through laser focussed targeting, buyers know they have a real shot of getting financing at a rate close to the predicted value, sellers know that buyers are serious if they follow through with the application, and lenders know that, if they want the business, they have (at least) a 33% chance of getting it. That gives these lenders better odds than banks offering a mortgage! Moreover, since APPROVE targets the quote requests, the odds that they will be willing to quote the application is 80% or more, compared to 50% at best for a random application. This means that APPROVE is at least 60% better for lenders than random seller referrals, making it worth the lender’s time to process buyer applications from the APPROVE platform much more quickly.

Moreover, unlike most of the market “lending” platforms out there, all parties have complete visibility into where the application is at all times.

The buyer can see when the financing request has been formally issued to the lenders, when a lender has returned a quote or rejected it, and then the 3 quotes side by side once 3 are received (and then select one to accept through the platform).

The lender has a view into the status of all of its open requests, as well as its request history, and all communications between it and either the APPROVE or supplier financing team (to collect any additional data it decides that it needs to issue a quote).

The lessor/seller can see where the process is at any time for each buyer that submitted a financing request, any communications that went back and forth between the APPROVE financing team and the lender (on the lessor/seller’s behalf), what quotes were returned, and when a buyer has accepted a quote and then begin the process on their end of completing the transaction without delay.

The APPROVE platform, especially when accessed through KWIPPED, a supplier web site, or third-party marketplace, makes the entire process of finding the right equipment, engaging with the supplier, getting the right financing, and closing the deal smooth, efficient, and relatively painless for all parties.

So while, like KWIPPED, this is NOT a typical sourcing or procurement platform that SI would normally cover, it is a very important platform nonetheless as most of your direct, indirect, and complex services sourcing platforms don’t enable the identification of rent-to-own or lease-to-own options when you need to temporarily (or permanently) acquire new equipment for a new construction, commissioning project, factory, or lab, and definitely don’t help you with financing when you can’t afford to, or don’t want to (because you have other, better, uses for your working capital now), pay for the equipment up-front. Like KWIPPED, APPROVE fills a very specific niche that is overlooked until it is desperately needed, and one that any organization that needs to rent or buy equipment, that just can’t be sourced or procured through normal S2P/P2P platforms, should know about.

Find a Supplier You Won’t Part Ways with Using PartFox!

Partfox, billing itself as AI-Powered CNC Matching, Locally or Globally, is an offering from a Zurich-based tech company that was created to solve the dual problems of

  • allowing a buyer to find CNC (Computer Numerical Control) factories that can precisely meet the buyer’s need for a custom manufactured part, allowing the buyer to short-circuit a long discovery and qualification cycle only to find out that a factory doesn’t have the right equipment that meets the stringent manufacturing and metrology needs, can’t work with the desired materials, doesn’t have the right certifications, etc. etc. etc.
  • allowing a CNC factory to advertise its services to buyers who can quickly qualify it for RFPs and purchases

<p[> Partfox is the primary offering form Orderfox, founded in 2016 to meet the needs of the industrial B2B sector, of which they saw one of the greatest needs to be CNC factory location and matching for precise part pairing. While you may not have heard of them, they have been valued in Europe as a Unicorn startup and are just entering the North American marketplace.

For the Buyer

PartFox is an AI-driven commission-free global (and local) network (that can be accessed at no-cost for simple searches) that matches buyers with manufacturers that can meet their exact part manufacturing needs with exact machining capabilities, and can even take into account capacity and availability. When they say perfect match, they mean it because they can take into account the exact machining (including metrology) requirements, material requirements, dimensionality, volume requirements, region and country requirements, and certification requirements.

Using the platform is just a matter of

  1. creating a profile
  2. uploading your part file as a PDF (which will be parsed by an advanced AI solution) or an ISO 10303 Standard for the Exchange of Product Data STEP (STP) file (which allows for even more precise parsing due to its standard formats for 2D and 3D geometric data)
  3. specifying the region and capacity requirements

and then letting the platform find the matches. Then, a buyer can reach out through the platform to the manufacturer to let them know of an opportunity for an in-network manufacturer or connect through the manufacturer’s website for an out of network manufacturer. Using Partfox can significantly speed up an average direct Procurement process, and once an organization has embedded such a solution into their direct Procurement process, they can see cycle time improvements of 30% to 40%.

Partfox is a lot more than just a simple matching marketplace. First of all, it supports over 60 metrology and manufacturing technologies, which means matches are much more precise than traditional supplier discovery solutions. Secondly, it has the largest network of CNC manufacturers with almost 100,000 manufacturers currently in its database. Like Tealbook, it can scour the web for manufacturers and, when it does so, identify the equipment, metrology, and manufacturing capabilities it publicly identifies. It then creates a record and sends an invite to that manufacturer to register on its network to update its profile with any additional capabilities and maintain it over time.

I’d like to call out the 100,000 manufacturers. This is one of the largest, if not the largest, listing of CNC manufacturers out there, and definitely the largest we’ve seen with deep part match capability. It’s that latter part that counts when doing supplier discovery for custom manufacturing.

Before, or after, doing a search, the buyer can create a request for one or more parts, which contains the basic details required for exact matching extracted from the uploaded PDF or STP file, and specify the quantity and basic RFP requirements of quantity, delivery date, incoterms, currency, language required for communication, and deadline to express interest. This can then be pushed to all matching manufacturers in an area, or a subset of your choice, and can be published as public (where any manufacturer can search for, see and respond to your request) or private (and restricted only to verified manufacturers on the platform, as per the tiers defined below). In addition, block lists can be defined to ensure that certain manufacturers will never (ever) see it.

It’s important to call out that the buyer has full control over the specifications the manufacturers see and can limit part file access to verified, select, or NDA-accepting manufacturers only.

This, however, is where buyer capabilities end in the current release as the platform does not yet support RFP responses in the platform (which is slated for the next major release). This means that they will have to (re)create a full RFP in their default sourcing platform when they want to collect price and auxiliary data and invite the newly discovered manufacturers to their formal process (which is easy since Partfox will give you all known contact information in the organization summary).

Also note that the current release does not integrate with any Source-to-Pay, Supplier/Vendor Management, or ERP systems or come with an Open API that allows you to export the basic RFPs you define and matching vendor profiles. They are currently working with select customers on an advisory board to determine what would be the most meaningful and efficient method of integration, which will appear in a release after the RFP response functionality has been completed, and the methodology will either be:

  1. create the RFP in the ERP/S2P and push to PartFox
  2. create the base RFP in PartFox, and then push the selected vendors and responses to the ERP/S2P
  3. create a new standard export format and/or Open API and to each customer its own (which will likely come eventually anyway for customers that don’t use a standard S2P/ERP, but we all know that most customers want an out of the box solution, so you will likely see [a] or [b] well before this option)

(Early adopters will get input into these and similar product roadmap decisions!)

For the CNC Manufacturer

They can register on the platform and maintain a basic profile for free, before or after their website has been discovered (and if before, the platform can parse it and pre-populate some basic data in their profile for them) and be included in searches (but not in priority rankings), which ensures their profile is always up to date and accurate. For priority rankings they can purchase a basic (essential), intermediate (superior), or full (concierge) membership which will give them the ability to define capacities and show up in highly tailored requests (at the basic level), achieve a higher search rank and embed images and pictures in an enhanced company profile with a verification badge (at the intermediate level), and, in addition to a top search slot (as concierge vendors are ranked before superior vendors who are ranked before essential vendors who are ranked before free vendors), concierge-level manufacturers receive expert deal support, preferred buyer recommendations, and exclusive concierge deals.

Moreover, member manufacturers can access the integrated order management system that allows them to get (real time updates on) RFP invitations from buyers, see order requirements, and respond that they are interested directly through the platform. Moreover, premium members can access support services to help them identify potential buyers, access private RFQs, and get help with responding to buyer RFPs.

The supplier profile allows them to specify where they are, how to contact them, and all of the capabilities and certifications that the platform will match on including metrology, machinery, materials, and technologies — with over 60 different technologies supported along with all of the corresponding material, machining, and metrological capabilities of relevance.

So if this sounds like a solution that can solve your direct manufacturer supplier discovery process, which is becoming more critical by the day, you should check Partfox out. It is definitely worth your time to do so.

The Pundits Agree. Winter is Coming!

In a recent LinkedIn Post, THE PROPHET, a year late to the party (see the SI and Procurement Insights archives, and our Marketplace Madness post in particular), finally announced that Winter is Coming: The Great Procurement (and Broader) Legacy SaaS Rationalization and that it is going to be a very cold winter that will be Swift. Brutal. And very, very final.

There’s too many companies that took too much funding at too high a valuation with nothing to show. PE firms will be dropping these companies faster than a hot potato into boiling lava pits to focus on the companies in their portfolio with current year-over-year growth in hopes of making some of their losses back. Too many companies started without doing any research and literally built the 10th AP clone, SXM clone, RFX clone etc. of a dozen already existing solutions. (Just check the mega map if you don’t believe me.) In a race to the bottom (which helps no one), they’ll lose due to their lack of a bank account as they slash prices too deep in hopes of getting customers. Too many applications took a silo focus, didn’t build Open API centric, and the hurdles of plugging them in will be too much or too costly, and no matter how good the tech is, they won’t get bought.

And then Agentric AI will thin what remains (but not lead the cull as THE PROPHET predicts, because these AI solutions still cost money, and sometimes a lot of it, and for what they cost you can hire a real expert and not a fake one, license a few augmented intelligence tools for a quarter of what these over hyped Agentric AI platforms are charging (because they raised, and wasted, too much cash and have to recoup that before they become the next hot potato dropped into the lava pit by their PE investors), and have a super-human employee who does the work of an entire team, error free (with little to no risk of that skilled employee getting you sued as a result of a conversation, installing a back door for hackers on your systems, shutting down your systems for days, costing you 10X on a purchase due to a dot transcription error, or increasing your internal fraud [link]).

And for some of these companies, it’s already too late to pivot. For others, there are actions they can do. THE PROPHET offered some:

  • risk over-cutting
    (if done smartly)
  • consumption-based models
    (which will be more attractive to some potential customers)
  • challenge the team to earn their existence
    (but that doesn’t necessarily mean prompting GPT like a pro: you don’t want junkies)
  • redefine the sales org
    (a better playbook is key, and it needs to be differentiated)
  • Skip the Fairy Dust and Buzzwords
    (Hear! Hear! I’ve been shouting that for years! Unfortunately, not sure most of the companies out there know how to do that though! I know for a fact only the squirrels have been listening to me, and they are getting very tired of that rant. They like variety. Basically, it’s been a long, long time since marketing focussed on education and value and startups priced based on that.)

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. SI has posted entire series on:

Failures from those who raised too much and offer too little will be coming fast and furious. This needs to be repeated. You need to be very careful which vendor you buy from and what protections you have in place if they don’t make it. (In particular, there must be a “we own our data” clause which gives you the right to all of your data and the right to export all of it into a standard file format at any time, and that specifies your data includes rules and workflow configurations and the right to export those too — for example, in spend analysis, it’s not just the data, it’s the rules that create the cubes; in invoice processing, it’s the workflow and approval rules … you won’t be able to migrate to another system quickly if all you have is the transaction data, the data that defines the processes and rules is just as important. And if you can’t export all of your data, rules, templates, etc., at any time, then don’t buy the system!)

However, while the app consolidation will be brutal, as will the renegotiations if you want to be one of the apps that make it (now that organizations are realizing they don’t need 17 apps for S&M and probably shouldn’t have 17 apps in any function, including Procurement), Agentric AI (especially at 20K a month when you can hire a REAL person for 1/4 of that) will not replace people en masse (but AI-enabled technology will). Teams will be cut and replaced by two individuals who can use next generation augmented intelligence solutions that can truncate months of research and analysis to a few days and allow strategic decisions to be made in hours, not weeks, and shifts to be made seemingly overnight while eventually allowing 99% of all tactical data processing to be automated through evolving rules and workflows under expert guidance.

Moreover, at the end of the day, relationships are not built on 1s and 0s, and they are needed now more than ever. So not only will we have skilled technologists, but skilled relationship managers. (While everyone else who does nothing but push e-paper 90% of the time or code spreadsheets will slowly be eliminated.) Of course, this means if you don’t understand optimization, analytics, statistics, game theory, economics, and logic, or you’re not an expert in relationship management, you’re screwed, but everyone had a chance to study STEM in University (and skip the woke liberal arts) and learn the technical skills for the first set of jobs.

So this also means if the platform is not enabling this next generation of employees to become more and more productive over time, its lifespan is probably short.

So get focussed in your diligence efforts on solution acquisition if you don’t want your platforms disappearing out from under your virtual feet, and if you need help, call an expert!

Simplify Services Sourcing By NVELOPing Your Bid Packages!

Services sourcing in most organizations is a complex nightmare. It’s not simple like indirect sourcing where you identify a finished product need, send out an RFQ for a standard product spec, get some quotes, do a landed cost calc using your pre-negotiated or market spot-buy freight rates and current tariffs, and select the lowest cost bid. Easy-peasy. It’s not even straightforward like BoM (Bill of Material) or Program management in a direct sourcing application where you send out a quote package with a set of components, detailed drawings and specs on each component, detailed cost breakdown requests, anticipated production schedules, and compliance and regulatory requirement documents. (And yes, while this is a lot of work to put together even with the best platform, including platforms that can suck in the majority of requirements from the ERP and the PLM, it’s still relatively straightforward for an engineer.)

Services sourcing is complex. While services might have categories for the chart of accounts, and services professionals might have standard roles, and any subsequent request for the same service on the chart of account from someone in the same role with the same experience will be similar, they won’t be the same. Installing a cable line is not just installing a cable line. Is it a home line or business line? Do you have to connect to the poll, a junction box, or a rack mount? Do you have to drill through walls? Are they wood or cement? Implementing an ERP is not implementing an ERP is not implementing an ERP even if it is SAP or Oracle in all instances. What version? What cloud platform does it have to run on / integrate with? Which P2P and back office systems have to be connected? And so on.

On top of the basic project requirements, services projects require a lot of terms and conditions, NDAs, professional certifications and insurance requirements, key performance requirements, confidential information on current state and desired state, evaluation criteria, etc. In a typical organization, a bid package will consist of a huge stack of e-documents, hastily assembled (and riddled with errors due to the haste), zipped up, and sent off to bidders who, hopefully, when struggling to fill out the overly convoluted RFPs on a tight deadline, don’t miss any key requirements before sending it back. (When the organization is in a crunch, which it always is, a lot of this work will often be done by third party consultants who will be less familiar with the requirements than the overworked staff who don’t have time to do it, leading to oversights as well as errors.)

Nvelop was founded to solve these woes, namely

  • the time requirement to put together the core of the RFP
  • the need to ensure that RFPs contain all the required bid / information fields
  • the effort to collect all the corresponding documents
  • the need to ensure the terms and conditions satisfy legal
  • the need to ensure suppliers see and respond to all mandatory terms and conditions
  • the need to communicate with vendors in a secure, trustable, method
  • etc.

We’re going to discuss their solution by addressing these points.

The RFP Core

Services RFPs are extensive and time consuming to put together. So Nvelop gets around this by jump-starting the process with LLMs that will create a starting RFP given:

  • project type (RFI, RFP Lite, RFP)
  • domain (Technology, IT Services, Facility Services, Legal Services, Marketing & Advertising, etc.)
  • expected issues (high competition, business criticality, environmental risk, etc.)
  • pricing model (fixed price, target price, time & materials, etc.)
  • engagement type (staff augmentation, system integration, software implementation, consulting & advisory, etc.)
  • business domain (Sales & Marketing, Finance, HR, Supply Chain, etc.)
  • Technology [stack] (AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, etc.)
  • Enterprise Software (SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, etc.)
  • Business Criticality (1 to 5 scale)
  • Background Material (any documents with relevant information that will not be given to bidders)
  • brief project description
  • meta-data for management and indexing (due dates, owner, team, categorization, etc.)

It will use the LLM that is trained on generic project documents that match the request as well as historical projects from the organization to generate a starting RFP that will break the project requirements down into core processes and sub-processes with supporting requirements for the project type for each sub-process. For example, for an ERP Application Maintenance project, it will define the core processes of:

  • application maintenance
  • ERP system management
  • integration services
  • reporting and analytics

and for application maintenance, for example, it will identify the core sub-processes of:

  • issue resolution
  • incident management
  • change management
  • performance monitoring
  • user support

with a detail description of each sub-process and bidder requirements. For example, for issue resolution, it might break down into

  • vendor must allow users to log issues through a portal and issue confirmations and ticket numbers
  • vendor must investigate all issues within one business day, regardless of criticality
  • vendor must respond to critical issues within one hour with a resolution team and estimated timeframe for resolution
  • vendor must maintain a knowledge base updated bi-weekly with common issues and resolutions for self-help
  • etc.

Once the initial RFP has been auto-generated, the buying team can

  • add internal comments during team discussions and/or collectively prioritize requirements
  • manually add, edit, or remove any process, sub-processes, requirement or description
    with status (generated, edited, etc.) tracked
  • approve when happy (and the platform can be configured to prevent issuance until all requirements are approved)

All Requirements Accounted For

Nvelop is not a new-age rapidly developed Chat-GPT wrapper parading as a Procurement solution when it really isn’t. It is a new startup founded by consultants who spent 20 years doing services projects while constantly thinking to themselves that there has to be a better way, who came together and defined what the requirements of such a sourcing platform should be, who built a real platform (that walks buyers through a 7-step process), and who only use LLMs for generating content where it makes sense.

The platform has a fairly extensive administration component where, for a project type, you can define:

  • the starting bid templates
  • core documentation requirements
  • mandatory terms & conditions

and the generation logic will ensure that all of these are included in the starting RFP (and associated package) that is generated, either through custom LLM instructions or forced overrides.

It also has a document library where you can store all of your standard documents on company profile, insurance requirements, compliance requirements, general service requirements for personnel on your site, etc. that can be pulled into all relevant projects.

Effort to Collect Corresponding Documentation

Since the platform, as described above,

  1. has a document library
  2. can, privately, store all related documents relevant in RFP construction on a project basis

It’s very easy to automatically include all of the relevant documents in an RFP, as the majority will already be in the system, and the rest can simply be uploaded and the majority of relevant content auto-extracted by the LLM during the initial generation process.

Terms and Conditions Satisfy Legal

Not only can you include a standard clause library, in the administration section, but you can configure the application to use pre-approved legal clauses verbatim in requirements and draft agreement generation, and the LLM will only be used to generate the parts of the RFQ and draft agreement for which there is not a verbatim clause. In addition, if a clause needs to be adjusted for different geographies, categories, etc., you are able to configure the application to force the LLM to generate its response based on a library clause. In other words, if you already have something acceptable, you can be sure it makes it into the RFQ or draft agreement vs. just rolling the bones.

Forced Supplier Response on Mandatory Ts and Cs

RFIs and RFP packages can be designed to force a supplier to respond to each mandatory and critical requirement, where they can simply select a Yes/No or Yes/Partal/No response with additional commentary, if required. This way a supplier can never say “they didn’t know” something was a requirement in the final stages of a negotiation as they will have seen and responded to it during the initial bid and requirements traceability is a core part of the solution platform.

Secure Communication

Since the RFP process is now going through a platform, where all documents can be securely downloaded and uploaded, all communications securely maintained in their own, auditable, stream, and all required confidential documentation can be accessed at any time once the NDAs have been accepted, the platform solves the security issue that buyers and vendors have with sensitive documents and bids being sent back and forth through email or common FTP portals.

Solution Summary

As we hinted above, the solution will walk a buying team through a seven-step process that consists of:

  1. Planning – enter all the data you have and instruct it to generate a starting RFQ
  2. Requirements – edit and finalize the requirements listing
  3. RFQ – finalize the RFQ (by approving or editing), which will consist of
    • overview information (introduction, your client info, submission and evaluation process, technical landscape, services overview requirements, services timeline, and other relevant information sections)
    • Questions – the requirements you worked on last phase, which can be extended with other questions about the vendor not core to the services requirements
    • Pricing – where the vendor will submit the bid sheets in the appropriate format that is automatically identified based on procurement type and category (including fixed price bids, rate cards, etc.)
    • Evaluation Criteria – where you define the criteria (and weighting)
    • Attachments – automatically pulled in
  4. Tendering – where you can see the RFP Preview (as the vendors will see it), select the vendors, and handle the Q&A; and where you can resend if you have to make an update or do a subsequent round
  5. Responses – which captures the vendor responses
  6. Evaluation – where you evaluate the responses once the RFQ is closed, and can compare them side-by-side at a high level, drill down into the details, and have the system generate overall scores based on the evaluation criteria (and weighting) you define
  7. Deal Room – where you kick off a negotiation process with one or more vendors, assisted by an automatically generated assessment of deviations from specifications or requirements that you will need to address (which will be based not just on clicked boxes but comments, likely intention, degree of deviation, summary of the deviation, assessed negotiation complexity, and likely relative importance)

Moreover, a supplier can easily access, and respond to the RFQ, through the vendor portal that allows them to quickly access the relevant sections, check the boxes, provide their responses, and upload documents. They can also engage in Q&A, and see the status of each project they have been invited to. The Q&A capability includes a LLM-powered chatbot that will search all of the available documentation and provide answers to questions already answered, including pointers to where to find that information in the RFQ package, and that will, when an answer is not found, direct the user to directly message the buyer for the answer.

Why SI is Covering and Recommending Nvelop for Shortlist Configuration

Those who follow SI will know that the doctor despises the rampant proliferation of untested Gen-AI and the random application of Gen-AI to every problem, even a problem so obviously far beyond what Gen-AI was suited for that even a complete idiot would abandon the tech once they say how bad it worked, so why does the doctor recommend this Gem-AI powered platform?

  1. it’s not Gen-AI / LLM driven
    the core is a solid workflow app that follows a process that the founders, each of whom have over two decades of services sourcing support, know works
  2. LLMs are being used for what they are good for
    massive document store summarization and document generation off of standard requirements and similar projects
  3. the LLM can be fine tuned
    and you can direct it to (re)generate an entire package, single document, single section, single process, or single line-level requirement description with additional instructions
  4. everything can be overwritten or manually generated in the first place
    Gen-AI was never meant to be the solution, but a starting point that can get you 90% to 95% of the way there when you don’t have an out-of-the-box solution, so it is designed to generate content where it can get “close enough” and where it’s easier to manually edit the generated output than to even generate a starting document from scratch through cut-and-paste
  5. every single line MUST be manually approved
    and while you can click that “approve” button without reading the associated content, if something is issued wrong, then everyone knows who didn’t do their job and who is ultimately responsible

Moreover, it will get you through a complex sourcing project mostly correct and mostly complete in a matter of weeks, with little to know external (consulting) support required, even if you’ve never done that particular complex sourcing project before! And while no solution is perfect, we’d hazard a guess to say even a neophyte would do a better job with this platform than a grizzled veteran who had to do everything manually under a severe time crunch. (While the grizzled veteran likely wouldn’t make any mistakes on anything they touched, they would be likely to miss something important in the virtual stacks of paperwork with more pages than a copy of “War and Peace” [Simon & Schuster edition] given the time crunch they are always under.)

Nvelop might be new, but it’s solid, which is what you get when you realize it is a solution built by veteran complex services sourcing professionals specifically to support the processes that complex services sourcing professionals use. So if you are in an industry with a lot of services sourcing requirements, and your current sourcing solution (designed for indirect and direct) is letting you down (and it is), then we recommend you at least give this solution a look. The responsible use of AI impressed the doctor, so we would fathom a guess that it should impress you too.

It’s Not Just Public Procurement Offices That Should Avoid Tech Fads

A recent article over on State Tech Magazine boldly stated that State Procurement Offices Should Carefully Avoid Tech Fads. And the headline, and author, was right. But it’s not just the public procurement offices that should be avoiding tech fads, the private sector offices should be avoiding them too. But more on this later.

The author noted that Artificial Intelligence is everywhere these days, and that news, advertising [and marketing] may leave you feeling [more than a bit] pressured to join the crowd and be an early adopter. But, as the article points out, and as THE REVELATOR would also be quick to point out, successful IT procurement inolves engaging with a comprehensive list of stakeholders, conducting thorough research and careful implementation planning, and, as THE REVELATOR reminds us on a regular basis, understanding what you need in the first place.

As the author notes, emerging technologies often present unforeseen challenges and novel issues that procurement offices must be aware of and prepared for. Failure to do due diligence can lead to embarassing or costly results. Not only do you have the extremely high failure rates with advanced tech projects, exceeding 85% according to Gartner, but, as the author points out, in the public sector technology breakdowns can have much more consequential impacts. The Air Canada lawsuit is just the first example of what is to come from the inevitable failures of AI not ready for prime time.

It’s not about the hype, it’s about the value the solution will provide, which includes, as the author notes, the total cost of ownership and longevity. The solution must fulfill the organizational need, not the hype. Otherwise, the total cost of ownership is high as no value is delivered while the longevity will be very limited.

But this should be just as true in the private sector. After all, a solution that could get you sued if it fails, that doesn’t solve the problem, that is worthless from the minute it is implemented, and that will paralyze you until a replacement is found and implemented is not something you should ever, ever want in private industry either. So don’t fall for the hype, and stay on the course that’s right — real solutions that solve real problems.