Traditional procurement software solutions are mostly oriented towards large corporates, require tedious implementation trajectories and tend to be overly expensive. We partnered with Progressio, a consulting firm with over 20 years of deep industry expertise to build a pragmatic procurement SaaS platform for medium sized companies.
We set out on a mission to map out the core workflow and communication flow between buyers and suppliers in tendering procedures and translate it into an intuitive interface with the related business rules and technical setup.
Valcori is a tender management platform where buyers and companies can gather multidisciplinary teams to create qualitative and quantitative requests and send those to their suppliers. Suppliers can digitally send their offers while the communication flow is managed through the platform in line with professional ethics. A smart algorithm will eventually assist the buyers in selecting the most suited supplier.
faster tendering
template questions
easy steps to launch a tender
While we have years of experience in the procurement industry, we lack the knowledge and experience to build a digital product that users love. We focused on the commercial roll-out, Panenco took control over the entire process from product design to software engineering and marketing.
After speaking with multiple buyers and suppliers, we designed a 7-step process that allows them create their tender in a digital manner.
Knowing that our users are not always digital natives, we tirelessly iterated on the number of clicks and actions (1) a buyer would need to set up and launch a tender and (2) the supplier would need to open and respond to the tender by means of a clickable prototype. These validation rounds were accommodated using Maze, a product research platform in which we set objectives for users based on the clickable prototype and measure success rates.
Procurement departments don’t operate in a standalone environment. Tenders are carried out by interdisciplinary teams, intertwining finance, legal, product, engineering, and other parts of the business. We therefore set up the architecture in a way that allows synchronisations with external ERP or CRM systems.
We gathered a dedicated team of software engineers that focused on (1) an open and performant back-end and (2) an intuitive front-end application. With a clear focus on daily software updates and high performance standards, we configured an automatic error-monitoring solution and ci/cd pipelines that allow us to bring improvements to users quickly. This way, each buyer and supplier on Valcori will have a continuously greater purchasing experience as the product evolves.
We launched Valcori as a Beta version in the spring of 2022 with consultants and trusted clients of Progressio as the audience. After validating the user flow, we further simplified the flow for both buyers and suppliers. After the summer of 2022, we fully launched Valcori globally, making the platform available for procurement professionals based on a low-entry subscription model targeted at medium and large-sized companies.
While we scale up Valcori's client base by using digital marketing techniques, we observe every user interaction in parallel and closely listen to the feedback of both buyers and suppliers to further optimise their tendering processes. The goal is to ultimately become a leading point solution for tender management in the wide sphere of procurement software.
