Jan 20, 2022

These global organizations are partnering up to speed up the process of tender management. Cognization is an American-based multinational technology company that helps in providing business consulting, information technology, and outsourcing services. Cognizant gives organziations the insights to predict what customers want and plan according to deliver on those demands. The company helps in achieving the goal of every modern business staying one step ahead of a fast-changing world. The company’s services include digital business and technology, digital business operations, and Cognizant consulting. The leading biotechnology company CSL Behring needed a global solution to recognise and track the thousands of tenders, or requests for products, that generate significant annual revenue. The company wanted to recognise upcoming Tenders, respond to the current ones and get the results of the prior responses to decide effectively on the opportunities and threats making informed decisions. Tenders are the troublesome processes that are rigid, not allowing the vendors to come to terms and requiring them to submit their bits within a predefined period of time whether it be months or days. And so, the company wanted a solution with which they can have knowledge over the upcoming tenders that can generate sales workforce to help shape the tender to prepare for responding. And tender management is also a complex process, that handles teams that have knowledge of local competitors, business conditions, and pricing to have an in-depth understanding of the product and its uses. And these processes are often manual in nature and so it becomes difficult for top management to get an understanding of the current and expected tender pipeline and the revenue to be generated. Initiatives Many life sciences companies realize the advantages of tender management but of them, only a few implement an end-to-end tender management software solution across local affiliates that are operating in various cultures and languages. But CSL Behring partnered with Cognizant to select and deploy a solution to reach their vision. After considering all the points, CSL Behring chose FBK CMIXS (BackOffice) for its flexibility, maturity, and support for end-to-end tender management to provide analytics and reports with KPI dashboards in a corporate business intelligence system. Since the company operates in certain geographies that use requests for proposals and request for quotes for better opportunities to negotiate terms than tenders, the new FBK CMXS was also used to manage those too. The joint team of Cognizant and FBK configured the solution to meet the demands of every market and user population meet all the legal requirements. Both as a team refined the business processes and added functions and interfaces with more new applications. The practices that accelerated the success are: Project Management: Cognizant conducted calls with corporate leaders to report on progress and resolve issues frequently changing the resource such as COVID-19 travel bans. Change Management: As new technology and processes can attain success only if people use them appropriately, the team solicited feedback from the local managers and business users on bid approval workflows, providing nearly 40 onboarding workshops training 45 local experts on the system. Testing: Cognizant has developed country-specific tests for several business scenarios, conducting user acceptance testing and allowing users to test additional business scenarios through building their confidence. Interface and Data Migration: The Cognizant’s lead data manager adopted the standard interfaces within FBK CMIXS for all the master datasets and templates for data ingestion ensuring data collection across the markets. The Cognizant and FBK have successfully mapped and integrated historical tender and RFP/RFQ data and configured list price data for customers of hospitals and pharmacies identifying those responsible for data collection and cleaning. Results The results of implementing a global tender management system, in partnership with Cognizant and FBK, global biotech leader CSL Behring is now able to priotise, prepare, and submit winning profitable proposals. This new global tender management system is likely to cut down the overall operational costs through standard processes and automated approvals. This in turn favours increasing revenue.