Swedish Consulting Group’s monitoring and managing of procurements has become a lot smoother with the help of Tendium’s platform. Vice President Lotta Hardless and Bid Manager Felicia Eksell share the many benefits that the company has received from Tendium, including time-saving and simpler ways of handling parallel procurements.
A daily process for managing procurements
Swedish Consulting Group is a meeting place for the entire consulting industry. They deliver both consulting resources and solutions to customers all over Sweden. A large part of their deliveries are made to the public sector.
Previously, Swedish Consulting Group handled their procurement inflow through email notifications from various systems. Nowadays, the handling of procurements has been integrated and become more evenly distributed in the daily work by monitoring the procurements in the Tendium platform. Felicia is responsible for reviewing potential business opportunities on a daily basis in the Tendium platform.
“With the help of Tendium’s monitoring platform we receive an overall picture of everything that has been gathered procurement wise. This allows us to have a more streamlined process for procurements, which has simplified our work”, says Felicia, who is the main person responsible for public procurement at Swedish Consulting Group.
Sorting out procurements faster
Felicia works on the Tendium platform every day and explains that the procurement monitoring is the tool the company uses the most. She also uses Bid Spaces where she drags procurements of interest. The workspaces are shared with colleagues who are part of the tender team.
Swedish Consulting Group also uses automatically generated summaries that are created in the platform. This enables the company to quickly sort out what constitutes an interesting business opportunity and what does not. Felicia can, for example, quickly view competence areas, geographical areas and the turnover of the contract, which are some of the parameters that are weighed into further assessment.
Better planning and more interesting business opportunities
Part of the value that the platform has brought to the handling of procurements at Swedish Consulting Group is the possibility to capture multiple interesting business opportunities at once. This allows for better foresight in the company’s handling of procurements.
“Since it’s faster to identify and filter interesting procurements, it’s easier for us to plan the work for the tender group, which will then handle the tenders”, Felicia says.
Expanding into new areas
With the help of Tendium’s platform, Swedish Consulting Group has expanded into more areas. Among other things, they have recently started monitoring the Danish market with Tendium’s procurement tool. However, the expansion is not only geographic.
The platform has also helped Swedish Consulting Group to bid on tenders for new areas of expertise. With the help of Tendium’s platform, they can now handle procurements without having to submit an expression of interest, register and unregister, which is something that many find to be complicated with public procurements.
In order to gain access to the tender documents, an expression of interest is usually made, but it’s not uncommon to then discover that the procurement in question was not something worth betting on. Deregistration in the procurement system is then required to avoid receiving all the emails with associated information that are otherwise sent out.
With Tendium’s platform, Swedish Consulting Group can access procurement documents and make decisions without having to register and unregister. An interesting procurement can easily be moved to the right tender area.
“We can add different competencies and it’s easy to see if incoming procurements are something for us. Instead of receiving all the emails, registering and unregistering for different procurements, we can get access to the most important ones: tender documents and their summaries. We easily choose to save or remove procurements from our tender areas,” Felicia explains.
Thus, Swedish Consulting Group can first access all information about a procurement and make a decision, before proceeding with registration and tender work.
Easier handover
Something else that Felicia appreciates about the platform is the ability to easily hand over work to colleagues.
“It’s very easy for someone else to jump in and cover for me. For example, during holidays, the day-to-day monitoring is handed over to colleagues who log into the platform and take over my work. It’s of great value to us that the handover takes place smoothly.”
It is not unusual that in bid work within a company it can be difficult to manage holiday periods or the like, especially if only one or a few people work with procurement within a company.
Fast support when problems arise
Something that Swedish Consulting Group finds extremely important is fast and good support. It’s something they particularly appreciated in their collaboration with Tendium.
“Support is very fast, efficient and helpful. It is something that we find very positive. When we have a problem with something, it doesn’t take several weeks before it’s solved, but it’s fixed in a day or two, tops. It’s very nice,” Felicia says.
She is also happy with the treatment the company experienced when they encountered and reported problems, and that the customer’s response is noticed and implemented in the form of adjustments to the platform or better support.
A complete system that fits and grows with Swedish Consulting Group
Swedish Consulting Group has recently created a new internal working method for call-off management, but they are also curious about Tendium’s call-off tool.
“We have previously talked about how we could handle specific calls on framework agreements. We want to evaluate our way of working before jumping into something new, but the call-off tool is something we could possibly consider in the long term,” Lotta says regarding the view on continued development and streamlining of the company’s work with public procurement.
Swedish Consulting Group has used Tendium’s procurement monitoring and tender areas for a long time. It’s a collaboration based on similar ideas about what a platform for managing procurements and tenders should offer: time savings, smoother workflows, better overview and good support – and the tools to grow with it.
“We feel that Tendium has a comprehensive procurement system that suits us,” Felicia concludes.
