We are a source of information

In essence this is the User Guide for the marketdojo software, except it is more related to the process rather than the software. We are so confident that the software itself with the efficient structure, clear process flow and thorough information help buttons will be so easy to use that you won't need a page-by-page screenshot guide. Therefore we haven't provided one. Instead, this guide outlines the process flow and key hints and tips to ensure the event is a great success for you.

We all owe it to the participants for the Event to be run in a fair, open and expedient fashion. This guide outlines the important factors you should have in mind whilst hosting your Event, e.g. having good levels of communication, detailing the award process and sticking to it, creating clear specifications and many more. If you follow this guide then your participants will appreciate the professionalism and courtesy with which you have conducted your Event and so will be more willing to extend the favour back to you. If however you don't take heed of any of the advice in this guide, then be prepared for your participants to walk away.

This guide is written to help you right from the beginning when all you may have in front of you is 12 months worth of data and the objective to find the market prices on the various spend categories. How do you take it from here? Well, please read the guide to get our explanation behind sorting and categorising the data into market-facing supply pools. Prioritise the categories by asking some pertinent yet straight-forward questions. Finally we address how you can approach a strategy for each category to make sure you maximise the potential benefits to your company.

To be used in conjunction with the above document, this is the matrix of questions that any organisation should be interrogating each spend category with in order to prioritise each category based on their respective strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks. We are confident that most organisations and individuals do have these questions in their minds, however it is useful to have these listed to ensure each category is subjected to the same level of scrutiny, so that a fair comparison is made.

For certain categories there is a tried and tested "best practice" approach to maximising the returns. This guide highlights some of the more common categories that are negotiated online and provides useful detail on how to approach them. Key tactics include splitting line items into Stage 1 and Stage 2 or creating Core Lots and Basket Lots and so on. If you are looking to run an Event on a complete category, then this guide should be reviewed before you dive in.

For any organisation or individual that requires a confidentiality agreement between themselves and whoever might be viewing the information, we have provided an example NDA which should be suitable. We would advise that you have this document checked with your legal department to ensure it suits your needs.

There are a number of spend categories which have hundreds if not thousands of line items. Rather than having to create or upload thousands of items onto the Market Dojo software, we suggest the use of a template such as this. It allows participants to price up the individual line items offline and then submit a total Lot price online, so that during the negotiation event they only need focus on one figure. Once the negotiation event is complete, the participants can upload their completed line item spreadsheet so that you have a record of their line item pricing.

In a similar vein, you can use such a method to also capture participants' cost breakdowns, such as delivery cost, raw material cost, tooling cost etc.

As part of our continued effort to provide useful category-specific templates, please use this template as an example approach to capturing and outlining specific road transport deliveries. This template works three-fold: firstly you can use it to send around your own organisation to ensure all sites provide like-for-like and comprehensive delivery information, secondly it allows your supply market to provide accurate and sustainable quotations and thirdly it allows you to rapidly implement any new logistics company since the information is so clear.

Occasionally a host may wish to advertise or promote the event to the market outside of the marketdojo software. To make this easy for you, we have provided a template "brief" which can be used to outline the key details of the event and how prospective participants can actively engage further, including a paragraph on how they can register for your event through marketdojo. Once this is sent out to the market, you should start to notice participants flocking to your event.

This document can be used as a crib sheet of all the key points that you may wish to include when you create your documentation pack. For example, informing your participants who you are, what you are looking for, what exactly you are negotiating on, what the commercial terms are or the service levels you are looking for etc. All these key points are flagged in this checklist so that when all these are ticked off, you know you have a robust package of information for your participants to accurately bid on.

This is the main document in the documentation pack that you make available to the participants. If the category you are placing on the Event is not complicated, then you will not need as thorough a document as this. However, if your category is a very complex contractual service agreement for example, such as temporary labour or corporate mobile phones contracts, then you should benefit from the clear and thorough layout of this template. It has been written to make it much easier for you to involve participants in the Event and highlights in red text the areas that you should re-write in your own wording, thereby already giving you a head start.

In case you would like to see what a completed example of the above document should look like, please review this example on an annual packaging supplies contract. You will hopefully see that the document covers all the required levels of information so that any new or existing participant to your business will be able to understand what the requirement is for and will be able to offer a competitive price as the margin for error is greatly reduced; a benefit to everyone.

You might like to give your Participants a short guide on bidding during the qualification process and the auction. This also covers contingency plans and the auction close. You can use this as training material to take your participants through the process before any event.

This template can be used to explain to participants how to bid in currencies other than the one you have specified. It refers the participants to an independent and reliable source of currency exchange rate histories which all parties can refer to on a specific date. This ensures that complete transparency is upheld as well as ensuring all bid comparisons are done on a like-for-like basis, as all participants shall be using the same exchange rate.

When creating a new Sourcing Event, you are able to upload a list of participants to the Event via a spreadsheet, rather than adding them manually. This template is pre-prepared for you so that all you need to do is paste in the e-mail addresses of your participants, save it and upload!

For those Hosts on the Full Licence, you can carry out a mass upload of participants into your own private database and allocate those participants into your own defined groups, such as "machinists", "stationers", "road freight" and so on. This template is pre-prepared for you so that all you need to do is paste in the various details of your participants, type in which groupings you wish to have, save it and upload from within the Admin section on your Dashboard.

For those Hosts on the Full Licence, you can carry out a mass upload of Hosts into your own private database and allocate those Hosts into your own defined groups, such as category or departmental groups. This template is pre-prepared for you so that all you need to do is paste in the various details of your participants, type in which groupings you wish to have, save it and upload from within the Admin section on your Dashboard.

Within our software you now have the ability to upload your Lots in one fell swoop, which means you can very much use the Lots as individual Line Items. Use this template to upload your Lots to save you a lot of time.

This guide is designed to provide some helpful advice and tips for when you need to bolster your participant involvement but are not sure where to start. By using a structured and organised approach, detailing out the key criteria for the participants you are looking for and interrogating the extensive global databases of well-known sources, you can achieve this goal to great success. Please read on to find out more.

This guide aims to help Hosts when they are looking to involve incumbent participants, as well as new participants, in an e-sourcing activity and do not want to risk damaging their relationship or being point-blank refused. It outlines the benefits a participant will have by taking part, the objections that a Host might be faced with and how to overcome those, and how to protect the relationship itself.

This guide has been written to provide you with some tools to assist you with the preparation and conducting of face-to-face negotiations. The guide highlights simple strategies and tactics to help structure a face-to-face negotiation and to quantitatively evaluate different suppliers so that you maximise your chances of success.

It is well known that an Online Negotiation Event is only one method for establishing the market price for goods or services. It is certainly not applicable in all instances, particularly not when you are faced with a very low number of capable suppliers. One such alternative is to negotiate directly with the incumbent supplier; however this requires you to have all the facts at your disposal, as you want to be fair to all parties. Even once you do have the facts, do you know exactly what they are telling you? This guide is intended to provide you with an outline of the key considerations and what to look for in order to prepare yourself for those pricing discussions. Please note that whilst this guide is mainly focused on manufactured parts or products, many of the concepts and ideas in this guide can relate to services as well.

In essence this is the User Guide for the marketdojo software from the participants perspective, except it is more related to the process rather than the software. We are so confident that the software itself with the efficient structure, clear process flow and thorough information help buttons will be so easy to use that you won't need a page-by-page screenshot guide. Therefore we haven't provided one. Instead, this guide outlines the process flow and key hints and tips to ensure the event is a great success for you.

This is a guide that you do not find too often, as it gives away some key hints and tips that most hosts do not want you to know. However, we believe in freedom of information and we feel that it will be a more successful Event for everyone if these practices are adopted. Whilst a host may be doing their best to include all the relevant information, it is common for one or two points to slip through the net. This guide suggests some questions you can ask that may reveal additional information that increases the scale of the opportunity for you, for example does the host belong to a parent company?

This guide provides the explanation of the various terminologies that you may come across during your time with Market Dojo or any other online negotiation software, for example "Host's Choice" or "market price". A useful read if there are any phrases that you are not familiar with.

As Online Negotiation Events have been around for at least 15 years now, we believe the timing is right to dispel some of the many myths that this approach has garnered. This guide highlights some of the more common beliefs and opinions that we have encountered and offers an alternative viewpoint on why they may no longer apply.

This guide provides a clear path through the full Online Negotiation process with marketdojo for both Hosts and participants. We recommend that if you use the software frequently, it could be a good idea to take a large print out of this 1 page guide to refer to until you know the process by heart.

The I-Adapt report. It is an independent assessment into the development of auctions as a purchasing tool. This study ultimately determines the impact of Online Auctions on the buyer and supplier relationship.

The I-SOURCE report. This is a summary of academic research into the adoption of e-Sourcing tools / techniques within the UK procurement community.

This presentation was given at UWE on the 19th April 2011. It focused on using e-Auctions to reduce your procurement cycle on costs as well as best practice.

The first tutorial guides you through the Sign Up process and introduces you to some of the innovative concepts that make using our software so easy, such as your very own Dashboard from which you can dictate proceedings.

This tutorial guides you through the first step which is how to create an Event and pick the settings that suit you best.

This step outlines how to create questionnaires for your sourcing event and to set up scoring and weighting with different question types, whether you want it to be Pre-Qualification, and more. In fact, there is quite a lot you can do with our questionnaires!

Step 3 is to create the Lots, against which the participants place their bids. We allow as many Lots as you see fit, so please watch this tutorial for help on how to correctly set those up.

An important part of any sourcing event is providing the right information to your participants. A way of doing this is to provide them with supporting documentation, be it your own Terms and Conditions, CAD drawings, photos, detailed specification sheets and so on. This video talks you through how to upload documents to your event.

This video tutorial describes how you can credit an event, if you are on the Pay As You Host payment plan. We also explain a little about our Pricing page and the various options that are on offer.

This video is the final step in the event creation phase. Within the tutorial we detail the various ways in which you can invite participants to the event.

Once your event is out in the market, your participants will hopefully be progressing the various actions, be it uploading documents, completing questionnaires, submitting quotes or even taking part in an auction. This video talks you through the Participant tab where you can monitor their progress.

Everyone makes mistakes, which is why we include an Edit feature in our software. If you notice a missing document or you wish to add more participants or change a Lot, you can do so from here. This video talks you through the Edit Mode.

Once the participants' responses to the questionnaires start arriving, you can assess them. This video talks you through the scoring of questionnaires.

The Documents section of an event will contain not just the documentation you made available to your participants, but also the documentation that they may have made available to you. Here we outline how to interpret the documents tab.

The Message Board is a really useful feature to keep all your communication in one place. This tutorial talks you through how to use this feature.

An important part of any sourcing event is receiving the bids from the market. This video talks you through this important step. You will either have a tab for RFQ bids, if you are running an RFQ, or you will see a tab for Qualification ("Qual.") bids.

After an RFQ has completed, you have the ability to progress to an auction. This tutorial covers how to do this.

The final activity to any e-Sourcing event might well be the mystical e-Auction. We hope to de-mystify this process and show you that it really is quite simple, once you have done all the hard work of defining your requirements, chasing in the participant responses and checking everything looks valid. Once done, check out this video to show you how the e-Auction works.

Once you have signed in, you may wish to upload your own company logo and menu colours to make the software feel like your own, not just for you but also your participants. You can also upload and manage your own database of participants and assign them into groups for future tenders. Finally, learn how to manage your Document Library to maintain the latest versions of your tender documentation.

This tutorial guides you through setting up your own white labelled portal with the software and shows you what it looks like. This is very easy to do and makes the software even more your own!

We have an innovative feature called the Sandpit. This lets you try out many different strategies as a Host and to see the process from the participant view, including all the e-mails that the software produces. Learn more about our Sandpit from this video.

This tutorial shows you the first step of any sourcing event as a participant - what to do if you have received an invitation e-mail. Here you can hear what to do with the e-mail, learn how to sign up and to see the event invitation.

Once registered, you can access the Manage Invitations area. If you are following an invitation you will automatically be taken to the Manage Invitations screen. If you have an invitation code you will need to navigate to Manage Invitations from your Dashboard. This tutorial gives you a good explanation of how to make the most of this feature.

Your Dashboard allows you to decide which Events you wish to take part in and which you may wish to decline. Once you have registered, every time you log in you will end up on the Dashboard, unless you are following an invite in which case you will go directly to Event Invitations section. Learn more by watching this video.

Upon a successful invitation and acceptance to an Event, you will be able to work your way through the various areas within it. The first hurdle could be a pre-Qualification Questionnaire. This is a gateway that you need to pass to see the rest of the event, just to ensure that you do have a realistic chance of winning the event.

Upon a successful completion of a Pre-Qualification Questionnaire, you may progress to the next step, which could be a normal questionnaire in the form of a survey of a Request for Information.

This tutorial explains how you place bids in a Request for Quotation. The process for placing bids in an RFQ is the same as for Qualification bids and in an e-Auction itself, making the process much easier for you. Watch this video to learn how to place a bid.

After you have been let into the event you will be able to see the Document tab. This tab will let you download documents that have been uploaded by the host and here you can also upload your own documents.

During the Event, you shall most likely wish to ask the Host questions about it. The Message Board is a fantastic way to go about this as everything is in one place for you, including all the previous questions you asked and the corresponding answers. This ensures that you receive all the same information as everyone else, as the Host can communicate to everyone in such an efficient manner. This tutorial explains how to use the Message Board service.

If you have taken part in an RFQ which has progressed to an e-Auction or your Qualification Bids have been successful then you shall most likely be invited to take part in the final activity; the Online Negotiation Event or e-Auction. During the e-Auction, you shall be given feedback as to the competitiveness of your bid in real time; something you don't get during a traditional negotiation. We appreciate this can sometimes be a stressful situation, so to give yourselves the maximum preparation, please take a look through this tutorial in order to feel comfortable with what you are doing on the day.

This tutorial shows you how to bid in a Japanese auction. In a Japanese auction you do not see your position, but you will need to either accept or decline the 'current bid' for each Lot within a given time limit. After which, if you have accepted the 'current bid' for a Lot, you will proceed to the next round where you will be asked the same question. The auction continues untill you can no longer bid for any Lot.