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hello everyone is Elizabeth here let's talk a little bit more about the procurement lifecycle and in this video I'm going to talk about the second part of the procurement lifecycle which is finding a vendor in our last video we talked about requirements and gathering the requirements to go out to the vendors to ask if they're capable of providing you with service we've done that bit now now we have to contact some vendors and find out whether or not they are able to deliver the service for us so once you know what your business requirements are you can start contacting suppliers to check if they're able to provide those services or those Goods and that stage of the procurement lifecycle would normally involve contacting contacting people and just asking them the question there's a few different ways to do this depending on how formal you need to be if you've worked with the supplier before or you have preferred suppliers on your books and then it's actually quite easy to do because you can just get in touch with your account manager and have that conversation they can't they may not want to take on the job but the first step is to ask if they're interested right if your company has suppliers for certain things that's an approach to take but you've also got some other options perhaps you want to go out to a different pool of suppliers perhaps you're not happy with your current supplier or perhaps your current suppliers can't provide what you need and you need to start a whole new procurement exercise looking for some new vendors to work with you can send out a request for information RFI which you cannot you might also hear called PQ q which is pre-qualification questionnaire and that you can use when you don't exactly know what solution you're looking for when you're you might have requirements but not perhaps the whole answer and you want more information about the available options and suppliers we'll get back to you with with those responses and you can send that out to one or more suppliers and gather the information to help you work out what to do next you can also send out a request for quotation or a request for a proposal or even an invitation to tender frankly I think they all broadly serve the same purpose which is asking people to bid for the work you set out what your requirements are you then set out exactly what you expect from the vendors and they then send you back their quotes in a format that you can easily compare I think that's the the trick there with the documentation is if you can provide them with a template to fill in for their return submission it makes it much easier to do a comparison of the different vendors who you've selected before you start sending out things to anybody it feels appropriate I might you might not feel the same as I do but I think it's appropriate to put confidentiality agreements in place with the vendors who you will be sharing information with because a request a tender or a request for a proposal may well have a lot of detailed information about your business about your information architecture your infrastructure your security principles all that kind of stuff that you perhaps don't want just to be made public for the whole world to see so having that level of confidential agreement in place with a supplier and comes at this point before you start to get into the contracting okay so you've sent it out you've sent out the questions in a way that makes them easy to respond to you've ideally you've got the questions in a format that makes it pretty okay to sort of drop those responses back into the contract later as you come into contracting with the provider later on and you want to if you can have a set of standard selection criteria but don't share them if possible don't share them with the with vendors you'll want to keep those to yourself I think I think it it makes it easier but you're you can make that judgement yourself and you then can use the responses you get back from those tenders to read and compare the different supplier information pieces that you've got tick them off on your selection criteria form and you'll find that you've got a very objective way of looking and comparing between different suppliers now vendors before you even get to that ticking off the form part you'll find that your vendors are coming back and asking you questions and they're asking you questions during the selection process during the tendering process is perfectly fine it helps show you that the vendor is serious it helps them answer they're quite answer your questions more accurately and you're giving them the best possible chance of getting you the right answer so it's definitely in your to your benefit to be able to respond back to suppliers the idea is you get well I would suggest you get a receipt I choose a date for the receipt of all the responses so you get all of the answers back in by certain day cut it off go through the responses do a comparison and then you'll be able to decide which if any of those vendors you want to take forward to the next point which could be getting them in for a demonstration or a meeting or for them to talk through their ideas in more detail or you may well find for a very simple procurement that you're done that you've you've got somebody who answers all your questions perfectly and it's a good enough fit you're just going to go with them so get your answers back do your supplier selection at that level and then decide how much more you need to dig into in order to find the right supplier to work with okay that's it for that part of the procurement lifecycle and I'll see you in my next video bye