Webinar
Webinar Recording: More Competition, Lower Costs – RFQs as a Lever in Procurement
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RFQs (Requests for Quotation) are far more than a formality in daily operations. Properly set up, they transform scattered data and gut feelings into competition, price transparency, and measurable savings. In this recording, Simon Schaub (Customer Development, Tacto) and Jakob Hafner (Product Management, Tacto) show how modern procurement organizations strategically deploy RFQs: from identifying potentials through structured quoting to evaluation and savings reporting.
Starting Point – Why Traditional RFQs Often Miss Their Potential
Many procurement departments still work with Excel lists, email threads, and manual copy-paste between ERP, document repositories, and PDFs for price requests. This not only costs capacity but also prevents systematic comparisons: quotes are inconsistent, responses are scattered, and the overview is missing. The result is that RFQs are launched too infrequently, supplier competition falls short of its potential, and price benchmarks are lacking.
The consequences are clearly visible in numbers:
- 85% of procurement leaders do not know the annual number of RFQs sent.
- 78% of companies negotiate prices without a prior comparison request.
- On average, 5 hours per week per buyer are lost to manual RFQ management in Outlook/Excel.
Neglected RFQs quickly lead to six- to seven-figure additional costs over the year. The savings are literally lying on the street but are not systematically collected organizationally.
Two Savings Levers: Cost Avoidance & Cost Reduction
- Cost Avoidance: Threatened price increases are countered with competitive quotes. Quote rounds increase pressure, deliver reliable counterarguments, and stabilize conditions.
- Cost Reduction: Regular benchmarking at the right time identifies market price levels – often the new reference values alone are enough to achieve better conditions with existing suppliers (without necessarily switching).
Why timing matters: Those who rarely benchmark "miss" falling market prices – the procurement curve stays high while the market is already cheaper. Systematic RFQs level this gap.
Standardization That Frees Up Capacity
A core problem of traditional RFQs is the heterogeneity of responses. Tacto addresses this:
- Intuitive setup directly from the article master; no supplier login required, responses can be imported from standard formats → higher response rate.
- Comparability out-of-the-box: Quotes are captured uniformly and can be evaluated in a structured way – without manual normalization in Excel.
- More suppliers per request – and thus more competition – because administrative effort decreases.
Effect on process costs: Depending on complexity, 10–20 hours per RFQ can be saved. This capacity flows into additional requests, better preparation, and cleaner negotiations.
From Reactive Firefighting to Proactive Procurement Radar
Instead of launching RFQs only for acute reasons (new parts, price increases), Tacto shifts the mode to proactive:
- AI recommendations suggest suitable times for benchmarking.
- Market and dependency risks (e.g., single sourcing) become visible; alternative suppliers can be evaluated in a targeted way.
- Round-based RFQs increase competition in a controlled manner – "best-and-final" becomes process logic, not the exception.
End-to-End Process Instead of Siloed Solutions
Tacto bundles the entire path from potential to reporting:
- Data analysis: Volume, quantity, and price transparency as the starting point.
- Signals/hints: Where do opportunities exist, which articles/suppliers offer leverage?
- Execution: Set up RFQs in a standardized way, make quotes comparable, adjust in rounds.
- Tracking: Document results cleanly, attribute savings, and make them visible in reporting.
Practical impact: Instead of reactive requests (e.g., only to counter price increases), a proactive cadence emerges: targeted benchmarking when market windows are open, and RFQs not just for A-parts, but scalable across the "benchmarkable spend."
Conclusion
Those who deploy RFQs in a standardized, data-based, and tactical way shift their role from price taker to shaper:
- More competition through higher supplier participation and quote rounds.
- Better prices thanks to clean benchmarks and reliable arguments.
- Less effort through standardization and automation of comparison logic.
- Transparent impact through clear savings tracking all the way to management reporting.
In the webinar, Simon Schaub (Customer Development, Tacto) and Jakob Hafner (Product Management, Tacto) explain how procurement organizations can increase competition, realize cost advantages, and free up capacity with an intelligent RFQ process. The focus is on creating a clear, scalable structure from scattered data and manual workflows that delivers both operational efficiency and strategic impact.
