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Procuring made Easy Better control of procurement services, for example, offers immense potential to cut down costs and cycle time while bringing in transparency and compliancy, which are high priorities for every government By Sujoy Choudhury, General Manager, NIIT Technologies
What role is NIIT Technologies playing to promote e-Governance and what are the key focus areas ? NIIT technologies is working closely with many Governments and offers e-Governance applications and services to enable key sectors to interact with the citizens and corporates in an efficient, cost effective and transparent manner. One of the key focus areas is the optimisation of the upstream and downstream Supply Chain of the public administration. Better control of procurement services, for example, offers immense potential to cut down costs and cycle time while bringing in transparency and compliancy, which are high priorities for every government. In this space, NIIT Technologies is offering a comprehensive e-infrastructure called Procure-Easy that helps governments to realise the vision of fuelling growth via profitable B-to-B e-commerce.
Can you tell us about some of your Government customers? Hosted and supported by Defence Science & Technology Agency(DSTA), the application drives the procurement of all the Government agencies of Singapore and helps all government users with features to raise
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Purchase Requests, Tenders, Corrigendum, Invitations To Quote, Evaluate the quotations sent by suppliers, Recommend supplier responses, Purchase Orders, Goods Receipts etc. As per the statistics for FY 2008, Procure Easy supported 10,000 buyers and 41,000 suppliers across137 Government agencies in Singapore with 5800 Tender cycles. Many other Government and corporate clients are using this application. In India, the Ordnance Factory Board is using this application across their 40 factories.
What is the USP of Procure-Easy platform of NIIT Technologies vis-Ă -vis your competitors? Being used extensively by many
governments and corporates Procure-Easy is a highly scalable, secure, configurable and workflow-enabled procurement platform, which offers best practices to the procurement organizations and seamlessly connects them with the supplier communities. While most products in the market offer e-Tendering, Procure-Easy offers end-to-end procurement functions – right from demand aggregation, to sourcing, ordering, invoicing and payments. It is a complete procurement platform that allows supplier collaboration, negotiation and closure in a secure Internet environment. The Dynamic forms in ProcureEasy can be easily configured to create a library of templates, which are used in RFPs / Tenders to collect item specific technical and commercial inputs. The inputs, which
are provided by the suppliers can be easily compared and ranked as a part of a detailed evaluation process. The configurable approval processes, supported by alerts and escalations, closely mirror the traditional manual processes and bring about significant improvements in terms of compliance and process time. The E-Auction services allow the the government departments to facilitate dynamic bidding and on-line exchanges for realizing unprecedented cost-advantages. The mobile interface allows buyers and suppliers to interact on an anytime-anywhere basis. Overall, Procure-Easy works as an umbrella application that sits over standard back-office Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application(s) and seamlessly integrates with the existing back-end processes.