Online Collaborative Sourcing Service

By DE Editors

MfgQuote.com (Atlanta, GA), the online marketplace for sourcing and selling custom-manufactured goods and services, has announced the general availability of a new collaborative sourcing service for OEMs that source custom-manufactured components through MfgQuote.com. The service is free, and the company hopes that it will enhance the MfgQuote.com community by furthering collaboration in the enterprise as well as help increase the quality of sourcing, improve buying decisions, and save time and resources.

MfgQuote.com hosts and manages the new collaboration service. The service does not require the purchase or maintenance of special software or hardware for you to leverage it. The service is free to purchasing professionals and engineers sourcing engineered-to-order parts on MfgQuote.com.

Collaborative sourcing on MfgQuote.com means the participation of multiple purchasing professionals and/or engineers working together internally or with external suppliers in a single sourcing system. The new offering provides a suite of online tools that streamline the sourcing process, automate collaboration, and manage the supply chain. Buyers linked together online can securely distribute RFQs (requests for quotes), collaborate internally with other buyers, collaborate externally with suppliers, manage supplier data, and perform advanced sourcing analytics at an individual, group, or product level.

“This service will allow engineers and buyers to collaborate with suppliers during the design phase in the product lifecycle and dramatically reduce the product cost and time to market while increasing product quality and customer satisfaction,” explained Mitch Free,  president and CEO of MfgQuote.com.

An example of how this could play out: A buyer may be responsible for the business aspects in a sourcing process and an engineer may be responsible for the technical aspects, such as providing CAD files or answering technical questions. With MfgQuote.com’s new collaboration functionality,  both can interact to produce an RFQ, respond to suppliers, and evaluate quotes efficiently.

The collaboration enabled through MfgQuote.com’s standardized sourcing platform gives companies a sharable, macro-level view of their supplier network. The result of this improved communication is higher sourcing quality, more informed buying decisions, and sustainable bottom-line savings.

MfgQuote.com also offers users system-generated and user-added notes to supplier profiles, RFQs, quotes and quote actions (award, decline,  negotiated, etc.), which provide a complete audit trail for sourcing events and create sharable corporate intelligence. Companies can selectively provide linked users the ability to share such data as preferred or approved suppliers lists, blacklists, supplier ratings, and prior history with a supplier. Users can create project folders and see rolled-up, projected, per-unit costs for all components in a folder as quotes arrive, making it easy to compare quotes to baseline or target prices. MfgQuote.com provides a comprehensive suite of reporting tools enabling companies to run on-the-fly what-if scenarios and to export data to Excel or other internal systems.

Other features include the ability to invite existing suppliers to participate in RFQs, even if those suppliers are not already members of the MfgQuote.com network and digitally signed non-disclosure agreements. For further information, go to the MfgQuote.com website.