New in TradeTapp: the award approval workflow
Big update today! Since our first product release in July of 2016, we’ve been carefully observing the way TradeTapp has been integrated into several unique procurement workflows. While our initial focus was on building the best analysis tool possible, we quickly starting noticing some interesting things happening behind the scenes, outside of the TradeTapp platform. Take the following email for example:
Feeling confident in the strength of TradeTapp’s financial benchmarking, risk identification, and mitigation recommendations, we decided to focus our efforts on bringing these offline conversations, happening either through phone, text, or email — online into the TradeTapp platform. Our latest release is the realization of that effort.
Introducing the all new award approval workflow
Emails like the request above, and their subsequent responses, can now take place entirely within the TradeTapp platform. In doing so, we’re now able to organize, track, and provide analytics about risk management behavior on a company-wide basis. Here’s how it works:
Requesting an award
At any point during the pre-qualification cycle, any user team can request approval for a potential award. The only information required is a project name, an approximate award value, and a date.
Review and approval
We also spent time in this release to revise and define specific user roles. We call users who receive and review these requests “reviewers”. Reviewers are notified of new requests by email, but can easily find all open requests from the new Approvals tab of the main vendor management screen.
Clicking on any award request will redirect to an entirely new “Awards” section on that vendor’s profile. For each award request, TradeTapp will automatically run the request scenario utilizing the Evaluation Engine. Without entering any additional information, reviewers will find a risk assessment, listing of key risks, and tailored mitigation recommendations pre-loaded for the specific request.
When ready to make a decision, reviewers can assign an initial status of Approved, Approved with a Risk Mitigation Plan, or Rejected to the request. For companies with a separate person to issue final approval, an initial status will trigger a notification to an Approver for final acceptance. (Note: for many companies, the reviewer and approver is the same person.) Closing the loop — once a decision is made, a notification is sent back to the original person who made the request, and will include any risk mitigation actions assigned.
Finally — since several vendors could be approved for the same bid package, we built a simple way to track actual awards made.
New data and insights
We’re extremely excited about the insights this new workflow will provide. Tracking each potential and actual project award, TradeTapp can convert company-wide behavior into detailed analytics. Here are just some to name a few:
- percentage breakdown of awards by risk assessment (low, moderate, high, severe)
- frequency of risk mitigation plans in place for each risk assessment level
- most common risk mitigation controls in place
- best-in-class industry benchmarking
We hope you find the new workflow useful, insightful, and enjoyable. As always, we’re thankful for your continued support.
If you’re interested in learning more about TradeTapp’s pricing, our progress, or just want to say hey please reach out to us at info@tradetapp.com.
