Buyers Information

BIDS - The Smart Choice for Buyers

Outsourcing - Today's Trend in Purchasing

In today's world of downsizing and belt-tightening, an attractive option for many organizations is outsourcing the bidding process.

Buyers earn their money by developing specifications, and evaluating suppliers and bids. Soliciting bids is the time consuming part of the procurement process, and it can be expensive.

BIDS™ saves you money in the following areas:

reduces expenditures for advertising, printing, postage, faxing, courier etc;
lowers prices from increased bidding activity (probably the greatest area for savings and the most difficult to document).
better use of purchasing staff time.
helps manage the tender distribution process.

BIDS lowers prices by:

increasing bidding activity which is the greatest area of savings and the most difficult to document.

BIDS helps you manage the tender distribution process by:

providing an audit trail of tender processing.
providing a listing of detailed vendor distribution.
making BIDS' library of tenders available to help buyers research, and for tender specifications.
providing awards and results of previous tenders for budget estimating.

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Vendor Registration

Some buyers require a database of current vendors. We will take your database and contact, at our expense, each vendor to notify them of the changes in procedure. We will invite them to register with BIDS as your vendor (registration information is custom tailored to your requirements). This serves to update the buyer's database, which often contains old information.
Buying organizations opting for this service receive an initial updated listing of registered vendors on CD-ROM with software to enable you to access and manipulate your vendor’s list. To ensure your list of vendors is up-to-date you will receive (generally on a weekly basis) electronic up-dates that are automatically incorporated into your master listing. We will notify all of our existing subscribers of the opportunity to register with you. This provides you instant access to valuable new vendors.

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Procurement software

TIPS™ is BIDS' professional procurement management system. It is a full-featured web-based application designed by BIDS to help its clients better manage their tender development and bid solicitation process. This program is designed to create, analyze, and distribute tender information. It allows for a systematic development of tenders, and permits the requested goods and services to be classified to a widely accepted classification system, which yields consistency.

It is an excellent alternative to more expensive programs, as we offer this program at no cost to the agency. We have developed TIPS to be comprehensive yet very user-friendly. TIPS is linked to our BIDS tender distribution system, which will automatically send the tender to all of our subscribers. With tenders under your threshold value, you have the option of distributing through the BIDS system or not distributing through BIDS.

With TIPS you can:

Create and issue tenders, attachments, and addenda
Close a tender and issue awards
Archive awarded tenders
Retrieve from archives
Build and maintain a list of vendors
Distribute tenders to specific vendors
Manage and maintain tender history

Benefits of using TIPS:

Saves time and money
Increased bidding activity resulting in lower purchasing costs
Customizable to each agency
AIT Compliant
Toll-Free support line

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To join the growing number of agencies using TIPS, and/or for a free demonstration/training session of TIPS, please call us at 1-800-270-4611

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BIDS is AIT Compliant

For those Canadian MASH organizations (municipalities, municipal organizations, school boards and publicly-funded academic, health and social service entities) subject to the Agreement on Internal Trade; BIDS is a "designated electronic tendering system" that allows you to comply with the "open procurement" provisions of the Agreement.

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Getting Started

BIDS receives tenders a number of ways from different buyers. If you have a full purchasing management system, we can take an electronic feed. If you generate tenders in a word processor, we will give you a simple form that you can put your data into. Getting your data into the BIDS system is easy, and we are flexible in adapting to the needs of each buying organization.

Call BIDS today at 1-800-397-0393

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