Ease your acquisitions and the RFQ process

Acquisitions often have to be made quickly without sacrificing quality or risking to receive something else than intended.

Requirements are often gathered in Excel tables or documents but these tools lack support for collaboration or facilitating a controlled process. It is easy to loose track of changes (who, what, when?) and difficult to follow when the requirements are well defined. Finding the latest version of the document may also be a hassle if it is shared in emails and stored in different locations. This results in inefficiency, confusion and may inherently lead to mistakes or purchasing something that does not meet the need. Furthermore it is not possible to automate the following steps in the acquisition process.

There is a way to make acquisitions faster, with better quality and control. Read the following 4-step way how.

Step 1 – Collect, review and approve all the requirements

Use a clear and controlled process to gather all the requirements to an online Polarion® LiveDoc™. Collaborate with experts and preserve information about everything (changes, approvals, comments, etc.).

• Speed – Enable simultaneous online collaboration without loosing control.
• Clarity – Identify and control individual requirements within the document. See who has changed what and when and what is the status of the requirement.
• Quality – Review, comment and approve individual requirements and freeze them once approved. Prioritize them to ensure focus on the most important things. Avoid the expensive mistake of incorrect requirements.

Step 2 – Automate the collection of responses

Automatically connect all the responses from the candidates directly to the requirements.

• Speed – Reduce manual effort.
• Clarity – Responses are directly connected with the requirements.
• Quality – All responses and comments are preserved in the history of the requirements.

Step 3 – Compare the responses

Use automatic reports for comparison of the responses.

• Speed – Graphs and reports give you a clear overview about the most important information for decision making.
• Clarity – Comparing different responses and comments for each requirement is clear and easy.
• Quality – Possible to add additional information like own observations, scoring or risks and all in the same system and directly connected.

Step 4 – Approve the quotation and validate delivery

Approve the quotation with content specified in the requirements and define acceptance tests for validation of the delivery. Ensure the delivery meets the requirements by running the acceptance tests and reporting results directly in the same system several times if needed. Any deviations by the supplier are easy to track as all the accumulated information including the original quotations is easily available.

• Speed – Gather the test results efficiently and
• Clarity – Have a holistic view of whether the delivery matches what was quoted.
• Quality – Test and check the right things against the original requirements and quotation.

All this is made possible with a solution implemented by Taipuva on the Siemens Polarion® Requirements management tool.

This simple, efficient and automated solution is a result of a decade of experience and customer collaboration. It can be easily adapted to match your organizations exact needs!

The core of the solution is Polarion’s patented LiveDoc, which makes online collaboration easy, controlled and efficient. Polarion is quick and simple to deploy e.g as a hosted solution by Taipuva in the AWS cloud. Polarion digital platform can also be utilized for many other things like requirements, test, risk, project, change and task management.