| Cooperative Bidding
Never has there been a time in government where we have been asked to do more with less and be so diligent in looking for ways to cut costs and save money. eProcurement technology has been available for years but adoption has been slow due to change and prohibitive costs to either the agencies or the vendors. While eProcurement is not the answer to all woes there is much that it can do to help individual agencies and regional agencies in working together to cut costs. Listed below are some of the benefits of cooperative bidding. This technology allows us multiple agencies, or Cooperatives, to work together in cutting costs and saving money. The service Public purchase is offering is FREE to you and your vendors. You get access to the latest and greatest technology in this field and it also allows you to bring all of your purchasing power together so you can get better pricing on goods and services you all need. It allows you to offset much of the procurement load as you can easily join each other's bids.
- Notify your vendors of upcoming bid opportunities by email and put your bid documents online for the vendors to download. This can eliminate your cost of mailing and printing off your bid documents.
- Have your vendors register online to receive upcoming bid notices via email. You can manage these vendors electronically by having them fill out W-9's and other forms at the time of registration. This database is yours and you control the registration process.
- Allow your vendors to respond to your bids electronically. This will significantly cut the vendors costs of doing business with your agency and allow them to pass these savings on to you. You are not required to use this function but due to automated bid tabulation for large line item bids many agencies are seeing huge time savings on bids such as athletic and office supplies.
- Generate multiple reports that are easily exported into Excel, PDF or HTML.
- Each agency can invite all other agencies in the cooperative to participate in their bid on a cooperative level quickly and easily. All agencies wanting to participate would then add their quantities to the bid. Agencies can suggest additional line items they would like to see added to the bid. Because this is done prior to the bids release it greatly decreases the costs of goods and services. Each of the agencies can communicate with each other through a comprehensive message board before, during and after the bid process.
- Our goal is to provide a region wide vendor notification database which will allow vendors to register for notifications for all of the agencies at once. In theory the more vendors that are on your notification list the more likely you will get an increase in bid responses.
- There are no charges to the agencies for the Cooperative buying program. There is a minor cooperative fee for the vendors. This fee is $20.00 for an entire year of bidding with the cooperative. This is only charged if the vendor chooses to participate in the cooperative bids or choose to simplify the registration process by having the software register them with all agencies in the cooperative at once instead of each individually. Vendors can register for each Agency free of charge and can utilize all aspects of the system at no charge. The Coop gets to keep 50% of the annual fee charged to the vendors.