Finding quality consultants or vendors for your businesses
What is the problem?
Due to an overwhelming supply of consultants and vendors for business engagements in the market, it is challenging for firms to narrow down and decide on the appropriate service or product providers for their businesses. To prevent an adverse selection which will impede business growth, prior research and comprehensive checks should be done.
With the rapid change in business environments and the rise of SMEs in Singapore, the government has been actively helping businesses by providing financial grants to aid their growth. Stringent checks and assessments are required to be performed on the vendors and consultants engaged by the grant applicants. Such regulatory actions take a sizeable amount of time and effort, and are fast turning into bottlenecks in the grant approval process, leading to project delays.
How to tackle the problem?
GovReview is a user-generated content (UGC) platform where businesses can give reviews and ratings on consultants that they have previously engaged. The aim of this platform is to develop a source of first-hand experience feedbacks that are authentic, honest and direct from the market.
Additionally, the government enforces quality and consistency in the reviews by moderating the crowd-sourced ratings. When sufficient reviews are amassed, GovReview has the ability to evolve and help organizations identify suitable working partners to grow their businesses.
What are the benefits of GovReview?
Aside from being a one-stop review platform, businesses can know their aggregated ratings over time.
Additionally, when machine learning technology is added in the future where extensive statistical techniques are performed on the collected review data, the platform can intelligently churn out relevant recommendations to organizations on grants and consultants or vendors that best fit their business requirements or profiles. This helpful feature will save the businesses time and effort by narrowing down the options available quickly and accurately.
On the other hand, government agencies will be able to access, share and reuse these centralized product or service reviews available on the platform across the government. In turn, this will efficiently help to optimize the grant approval process as well as assist the government officers in their selection of companies for their pre-scoped solutions.
How do we implement GovReview?
With maximum reusability and flexibility in mind, GovReview is built as APIs so that businesses and government agencies can innovate and develop their own apps based on their own use cases.
For example, if a business wants to create a dashboard to view certain metrics of the consultants or vendors belonging to a certain industry, they can do so by calling the relevant APIs and get the data out. Another example is that the government agencies can integrate the review data from the API to automate the grant evaluation process. This will increase efficiency and productivity, allowing government officers to focus on more value-adding tasks.
If the existing systems in government agencies are not able to call the APIs, they can get access by subscribing to the portal. Any new features planned in the product roadmap in the future will also be made available.
The use of APIs and the portal thus allow easy access to centralized review information, thereby encouraging data sharing and synergy among businesses and government agencies.
What’s next for GovReview?
Currently, the APIs and portal are only available for government agencies as the product is still in its early phase and will require more intensive testings and validations before releasing to the public.
Who are the team behind GovReview?
GovReview innovation is not possible without the awesome team behind it. SHOUTOUT to Zhixun Lin and Chloe yao for the great idea as well as Kavan Koh, Kwan Cheng, Rabs, Charles, Andy Teng, Wynn, Kok Boon, and Jonathan for the great development effort!
Any feedback or idea to improve GovReview platform? Leave a note if you have any.
PS: We are hiring!
