Africa’s infrastructure financing gap—estimated at $50–90 billion annually in 2025—represents a critical barrier to sustainable growth, costing the continent up to 2% of GDP each year and perpetuating challenges like energy poverty and low productivity. Cumulative shortfalls could reach $1.6 trillion by 2030 without intervention.

Closing this gap could boost GDP by $180–300 billion annually, drive poverty reduction, and create millions of jobs, particularly through initiatives like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

Public procurement, accounting for 17% of Africa’s GDP (approximately $527 billion annually), is a linchpin for infrastructure delivery but is hindered by inefficiencies, corruption, and fragmentation. EdgeworthBox, an advanced e-procurement platform, addresses these pain points by breaking silos, enabling collaborative discussions, hosting adaptable contracts, and ensuring total transparency—now enhanced with AI consultation for intelligent needs definition, real-time collaborative RFP design, smart execution automation, data-driven analysis, intuitive user experiences, complete audit trails, AI-accelerated RFP processes, enhanced supplier discovery, and outcome-based pricing. Widespread adoption could yield $69–195 billion in annual benefits through cost savings, fraud recovery, efficiency gains, and mobilized private funding—directly contributing to gap closure and economic transformation.

This whitepaper outlines the scale of the challenge, the barriers (with a focus on procurement failures), and how EdgeworthBox can catalyze change, supported by data from leading institutions like the African Development Bank (AfDB), OECD, and McKinsey.

2 Mind the Annual Gap

The infrastructure gap in Africa refers to the annual shortfall in funding required to develop and maintain essential physical and digital assets, such as energy, transport, water, and telecommunications, which are critical for economic growth, trade, and quality of life.

According to multiple authoritative sources, including the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD), Africa’s total annual infrastructure needs range from $130 billion to $170 billion [20][21][22]. Current investments average around $80 billion per year, resulting in an annual financing gap of $50–90 billion [70][71][74]. This gap reduces the continent’s GDP growth by approximately 2% annually and exacerbates issues like energy poverty (affecting nearly 600 million people without grid electricity) and low productivity [7].

Recent 2025 reports, such as those from the Africa-Europe Foundation and AUDA-NEPAD, reaffirm the $130–170 billion annual need, with the gap persisting due to factors like poor project preparation (80% of projects fail at feasibility), limited private sector involvement, and insufficient domestic resource mobilization [5][6]. The AfDB’s updated estimates highlight a slightly narrower gap of $70–90 billion, emphasizing the need for innovative financing like Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) and blended funds to unlock up to $2 trillion in domestic capital [23]. Older estimates, such as McKinsey’s 2016 projection of $150 billion needed by 2025 to reach 4.5% of GDP in infrastructure spending, have largely been superseded by these figures but underscore the long-standing nature of the challenge.

Closing this gap could add up to $180 billion to Africa’s GDP by enhancing connectivity and industrial capacity, particularly under initiatives like the AfCFTA and the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA), which has 69 priority projects costing $160.8 billion overall [18][19].

3 Mind the Overall Gap

Based on reports from the African Development Bank (AfDB), OECD, and others, the cumulative infrastructure financing gap for Africa—i.e., the additional funding needed beyond current investments to close disparities and meet needs—is estimated in the range of $800 billion to $1.6 trillion over the 2021–2030 period (roughly 10 years, with ~5 years remaining from the current date). This cumulative figure is derived from annual gaps projected to grow from the current $50–$90 billion in 2025 to $80–$160 billion by 2030, reflecting rising needs due to population growth (projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050) and urbanization.

4 Benefits of Closing Africa’s Infrastructure Gap

Closing Africa’s infrastructure gap would yield substantial economic, social, and productivity gains, primarily by enhancing connectivity, reducing costs, and enabling initiatives like the AfCFTA. The $180–$300 billion in annual GDP gains referenced earlier draws from sector-specific projections, such as digital infrastructure (up to $300 billion in internet-related GDP contribution by 2025) and AfCFTA trade facilitation (contributing $292 billion cumulatively toward a total $450 billion income boost by 2035, or roughly $30–$40 billion annualized) [10][11][12]. Broader estimates from the African Development Bank and World Bank focus on a consistent 2 percentage point increase in annual GDP growth, equating to approximately $60–$70 billion per year based on Africa’s ~$3.1 trillion GDP in 2025 [7].

These benefits compound over time: for instance, AfDB projections suggest sustained investments could raise infrastructure spending to 4.5% of GDP, unlocking $2.5 trillion in project pipelines by 2025.

5 Consequences if Status Quo Persists

Maintaining the current financing levels (~$80 billion annually vs. $130–$170 billion needed) perpetuates a vicious cycle of underdevelopment, shaving off economic potential and exacerbating inequalities. The AfDB estimates this status quo already costs Africa 2% in annual GDP growth, while broader impacts include stalled industrialization and persistent service deficits. Key stats illustrating the ongoing toll:

If unaddressed, the gap could widen to $100+ billion annually by 2030 due to population growth (to 2.5 billion by 2050) and climate costs ($10–$20 billion extra/year), further entrenching a $1.6 trillion cumulative shortfall by decade’s end and reducing poverty alleviation by 25%. Initiatives like the AfDB’s $50 billion lending pipeline offer hope, but without scaling private investment, these drags will compound.

6 What’s Getting in the Way?

Africa’s infrastructure financing gap, estimated at $50–$90 billion annually, persists due to a combination of structural, institutional, and economic barriers. Based on recent analyses (as of 2025), the primary obstacles revolve around financing constraints, project preparation deficiencies, and enabling environment issues. These factors create a “paradox” where demand for investment is high, but supply-side hurdles prevent scaling. Below is a ranked overview of the top factors, drawn from reports by the African Development Bank, McKinsey, OECD, and others, with approximate contributions to the gap where quantified:

These factors are interconnected—e.g., poor preparation amplifies financing risks—and if unaddressed, could push the cumulative gap to $1.6 trillion by 2030.

6.1 The Role of Procurement Failure

Procurement failures play a significant but not dominant role, contributing an estimated 20–30% to overall project failures and exacerbating the broader gap by inflating costs and delaying timelines—particularly through inefficiencies like non-competitive bidding and compliance errors, which account for 30–50% of delays and ~$5–$10 billion in annual wastage continent-wide.¹ They are most acute in the early stages (feasibility and tendering), where they intersect with governance issues like corruption and poor strategic planning, with corruption alone causing ~20% of failures (e.g., misallocated funds and wrong-site builds) and 25% of public procurement system breakdowns attributed to weak anti-corruption commitment.

Credible data pegs procurement-related issues as a key driver of the documented 80–90% early-stage failure rate, but not the sole cause—design errors, funding shortfalls, and leadership gaps share the blame. Procurement is a “gatekeeper” process: failures here prevent 70–80% of projects from advancing due to lack of budgets for robust tenders and unfamiliarity with best practices. However, it’s amplified by external factors like funding constraints (top cause at 40%) and governance (30%). Reforms, such as strategic procurement frameworks, could reduce failures by 15–25%, unlocking $20–$30 billion in viable projects yearly.

Addressing procurement through digital tools and capacity building (e.g., AfDB’s initiatives) is low-hanging fruit, but holistic reforms targeting financing and preparation are essential for full gap closure. Procurement’s gatekeeper role makes it pivotal: improving it not only cuts direct losses but also builds investor confidence, potentially mobilizing 20–30% more private funding.

7 How EdgeworthBox Can Break the Status Quo of African Procurement Processes

Public procurement in Africa, which accounts for an average of 17% of GDP across the continent (equivalent to $527 billion annually), remains a critical driver of economic development but is plagued by inefficiencies, corruption, and bureaucratic hurdles.

While there has been progress in legal frameworks and digital adoption in countries like Rwanda, Kenya, and South Africa, the overall status quo is characterized by manual or semi-digital processes, fragmentation, and high vulnerability to corrupt practices such as bribery, fraud, collusion, nepotism, and bid-rigging. This contrasts sharply with the capabilities of a platform like EdgeworthBox, now supercharged with AI consultation for intelligent needs definition and vendor scoping, real-time collaborative RFP design, smart execution automation, data-driven comparative analysis, intuitive user experiences, complete audit trails for compliance, AI-accelerated RFP creation and supplier matching, enhanced supplier discovery networks, and outcome-based pricing for transparent ROI.

In summary, while African procurement has seen advancements (e.g., e-GP systems in Rwanda and Kenya improving inclusivity and data accessibility), the status quo is largely manual, opaque, and inefficient, particularly in infrastructure where funding constraints, customs delays, and political risks compound issues. EdgeworthBox’s features—now including intuitive user experiences that reduce training time and boost adoption across departments—represent a significant upgrade, promoting collaboration, reuse, and accountability with seamless, user-friendly design regardless of technical proficiency.

8 Quantifiable Impact of EdgeworthBox Adoption

Adopting a comprehensive e-procurement platform like EdgeworthBox could transform African procurement by digitizing processes, reducing corruption, and enhancing efficiency, based on evidence from existing e-GP implementations in the region. While continent-wide data is limited, studies from countries like Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, and Nigeria provide proxies, showing benefits in cost savings, time reduction, and fraud mitigation—now amplified by EdgeworthBox’s new AI consultation, collaborative design, smart execution, data-driven analysis, audit trails, AI acceleration, supplier discovery, and outcome-based pricing, which further streamline workflows, match suppliers intelligently, and ensure measurable ROI.

Impacts are estimated below, scaled to Africa’s ~$500–$600 billion annual public procurement spend (derived from 17% of ~$3.1 trillion GDP):

• Cost Savings and Efficiency Gains: E-procurement can reduce procurement costs by 10–20% through streamlined processes, better supplier competition, and minimized overpricing. In Ghana’s construction sector, adoption led to improved firm performance via time and cost reductions. Scaled continent-wide, this could save $50–$120 billion annually, including 30% efficiency improvements in operations as seen in COMESA countries—now enhanced by smart execution automation for repetitive tasks and deadline management, collaborative real-time RFP design with change tracking, and outcome-based pricing for transparent, value-aligned costs without hidden fees. For infrastructure, it could cut the 20–50% cost overruns from delays and inefficiencies.
• Time Reduction: Procurement cycles could shorten by 50% or more (e.g., from months to weeks), as evidenced by Rwanda’s UMUCYO system, which accelerated transactions and reduced administrative bottlenecks. In COMESA, digital platforms cut processing times by up to 50%, enabling faster project delivery and potentially unlocking $10–$20 billion in annual productivity gains for delayed infrastructure—supercharged by AI to accelerate RFP creation, analysis, and supplier matching (cutting weeks to days) and intuitive user experiences that minimize training and boost cross-departmental adoption.
• Corruption and Fraud Reduction: EdgeworthBox would reduce corruption by 25–30% through transparency and minimized discretion, as in Rwanda where e-GP curbed fraud and ensured fair market rates. Given Africa’s 10–25% contract value losses to corruption (~$50–$150 billion annually), adoption could recover $12–$45 billion yearly—reinforced by complete audit trails for every decision and communication, ensuring accountability and easy historical data retrieval.
• Broader Economic and Social Impacts: Enhanced competition and inclusivity (e.g., for SMEs and marginalized groups) could boost local economic development, as in Kenya where reforms increased access for women and youth. Common contracting could reduce redundant RFPs by 20–30%, freeing resources for infrastructure and potentially adding 1–2% to GDP growth via better value for money and innovation. In Uganda, e-procurement improved supply chain efficiency and SME reach—now elevated by AI consultation for optimal vendor identification, data-driven comparative insights for confident selections, and enhanced supplier discovery for faster, more efficient partner matching.

Overall, EdgeworthBox could help close Africa’s infrastructure gap by making projects more bankable and attractive to investors, potentially mobilizing an additional $20–$30 billion annually in private funding, with new capabilities ensuring seamless, AI-powered execution and measurable outcomes.

9 The Bottom Line

Based on Africa’s estimated annual public procurement spend of approximately $527 billion (17% of a ~$3.1 trillion GDP, as per World Bank and AfDB data) combined with benchmarks from e-procurement studies and EdgeworthBox’s enhanced capabilities—including AI acceleration, collaborative design, smart automation, and outcome-based pricing—the total potential annual dollar value benefit is calculated using a structured approach to avoid double-counting.

9.1 Methodology

• Data Sources: Drew from global and Africa-specific e-procurement impact studies, including percentage-based savings (e.g., 5–20% cost reductions), corruption mitigation (10–25% of spend lost, reducible by 25–30%), time/efficiency gains, and additional funding mobilization. Key benchmarks include: Cost savings: 5–20% of procurement spend, aligned with World Bank estimates of 5% total savings and up to 10–20% in transaction/efficiency gains. Corruption recovery: Based on 10–25% losses reduced by 25–30%, per Brookings and Open Contracting Partnership analyses. Productivity/efficiency from time reductions: 50% shorter cycles unlocking $10–$20 billion, as seen in Rwanda and COMESA implementations. Additional private funding mobilized: $20–$30 billion annually for infrastructure, via improved bankability and investor attraction—now boosted by AI-driven supplier matching and data insights. Assumes phased adoption; pilots in Kenya/Rwanda suggest 20–50% metric improvements (e.g., Rwanda’s UMUCYO system), scalable to continent-wide.
• Excluded Overlapping GDP Boosts: 1–2% (~$31–$62 billion) to focus on direct benefits, as these are indirect outcomes of the above.
• Calculation: Summed low- and high-end ranges for direct categories. Assumed full adoption across public procurement (realistic with EdgeworthBox’s scalability, intuitive UX, and outcome-based pricing, though phased rollout would scale benefits gradually).
• Conservatism: Used mid-range estimates where data varied (e.g., avoided extreme 7–88% pooled savings for specificity). Benefits from unique features like AI consultation, collaborative design, and smart execution are incorporated into efficiency gains, with audit trails ensuring verifiable ROI.

9.2 Breakdown of Annual Benefits

This total ($69–195 billion annually) is a conservative baseline, reflecting proven e-procurement outcomes scaled to Africa. Emerging capabilities like AI-driven efficiencies could push benefits higher (e.g., up to $248.5 billion with full adoption), but such projections await validation through pilots.

10 Call to Action

For P3 units and infrastructure financing organizations, EdgeworthBox offers a proven pathway to efficiency, transparency, and revenue generation—now empowered by AI consultation for strategic guidance, real-time collaborative design for seamless alignment, smart execution for bottleneck-free workflows, data-driven insights for confident decisions, intuitive experiences for rapid adoption, complete audit trails for ironclad compliance, AI acceleration for days-not-weeks timelines, enhanced supplier discovery for optimal matches, and outcome-based pricing for clear, value-driven ROI. By integrating this platform, you can not only mitigate procurement risks but also unlock private capital and accelerate project pipelines. Contact us to explore tailored pilots and demonstrations, where we could validate potential benefits exceeding $195 billion annually with full AI integration.

EdgeworthBox: Transforming Procurement for Africa’s Future.

Bibliography

All of these questions (and the philosophy they represent) revolve around the transaction of acquiring the technology and the solution These questions mainly address the requirements of the procurement department. Indirectly, they address the question of how the procurement department fits into the organization chart. How will the C-Suite see procurement?

They implicitly ignore the end users, the ones who actually translate “strategic goals” into tangible action.

This is entirely the wrong way around. In discounting the end users, the ones who actually translate “strategic goals” into tangible action, the buying organization sets itself up to fail. It is a well-established fact that user-adoption is one of the primary reasons for the failure of technology-centered transformations.

Procurement’s customers are the people who are the future end users of the acquired solution. These are the people procurement should serve in the same way that the company focuses on its own customers.

If we are buying a solution that we intend to use for the next five years, the primary consideration should be the value created over the next five years. The bulk of the return on investment (ROI) comes from this, not from negotiating the price down with the vendor by a couple of percentage points.

The real ROI is going to be determined by those who use the solution, the intensity of their engagement with it, and the outcomes it generates that the organization would not obtain otherwise.

If procurement buys a tool that nobody uses, it’s a failed outcome. It is bad for the organization because they have wasted money. It is bad for the end users because they have to revert back to their old ways or produce kludgy ways to work around the newly acquired good or service. It is bad for suppliers who had hoped to build a lasting relationship.

It is a massive misallocation of resources no matter how compliant the process is.

The ROI of a product nobody uses is -100%.

Early-stage companies focus on building and determining what works and what does not. The nascent entity strives to improve features in their own product offering that the customers like and kill those that the market does not. This is the explore phase. The firm concentrates on determining what the customer needs the most and then works on making the customer successful in the most-efficient manner. When it comes to buying goods and services, procurement talks to internal end users and invests the time and effort to determine their exact requirements. While the procurement approach may be transactionally inefficient, using pen-paper, spreadsheets, and emails, the emphasis is on getting what the users need rapidly. Diligence may be incomplete. The firm may not get the lowest price or generate sufficient options from which to choose or buy the first-best solution, but rapid early-stage revenue growth can make up for these deficits. At least they prioritize end-user needs.

A company enters the exploit phase when it switches focus to managing growth and fulfilling demand for the product they have built during the explore phase. It implements processes designed for rapid completion and execution of tasks rather than on the accretion of value. In procurement, the objectives (and the KPIs) shift to narrow in on compliance, consistency, and efficiency. However, there are very few later stage organizations that incorporate feedback loops to assess how well the end user’s needs have been addressed and to measure the return on investment.

Currently, the entire global economy is undergoing massive change. End user requirements are changing as are the options available. It is imperative today to retain the user-focus of the explore phase. Central to this is collaboration and communication between the various stakeholders of the procurement process. At the same time, efficient processes and thorough risk management are imperative given the intensity of global competition.

In the explore phase, firms should implement a process much earlier than they do in practice. In the exploit phase, procurement should not forget that their primary allegiance is to their internal customers who are responsible for generating real economic value.

Traditionally, the buyers of procurement technology and services have been later stage companies because of the explore-exploit dynamic, so incumbent solutions tend to be over-priced and over-featured. They are not designed for companies in the explore phase. Incumbent solutions do not promote collaboration at all. They are built to support established practices with little to no capability to incorporate the needs of end users and various stakeholders

That’s why we built EdgeworthBox. We have built an easy-to-use platform for procurement that enables firms to establish robust processes when they are in the explore phase and allows firms to retain the collaboration and user-focus when transitioning to the exploit phase. We would love to talk to you about your procurement challenges. Please reach out to us at chand.sooran@edgeworthbox.com or naresh.rao@edgeworthbox.com.

Here’s MIT Nanda talking about the current state of affairs:

“Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return. The outcomes are so starkly divided across both buyers (enterprises, mid-market, SMBs) and builders (startups, vendors, consultancies) that we call it the GenAI Divide. Just 5% of integrated AI pilots are extracting millions in value, while the vast majority remain stuck with no measurable P&L impact. This divide does not seem to be driven by model quality or regulation, but seems to be determined by approach”

The study also states that the key features of the successful 5% are a focus on a few specific business functions viz. BPO/ Back-office operations and customization of the tools to focus on business outcomes. Vendors who succeeded in these areas are reportedly securing multi-million-dollar engagements rapidly.

The unsuccessful majority leverage tools like ChatGPT but fail to handle integration complexity, fail to align with daily operations and existing workflows, and are slow at contextual learning.

We have seen this movie before with earlier avatars of digital transformations.  However, we firmly believe that the Procurement Technology space is ideal for getting the sought-after success with Enterprise GenAI.

Jon Hansen, the procurement guru – a prolific commentator on the state of procurement technology – summarized what was promised with ERP. It seems eternally relevant:

“Enterprise-wide integration

Automated workflows

Significant cost savings

Process standardization”

Here is what he identifies as the fatal conceit of procurement technology:

“At the heart of this change is a growing realization of a fundamental truth that process and not technology is the driving force behind a successful e-procurement initiative.”

Most procurement technology is built for the large enterprise. It is neither suitable nor economic for small and medium-sized enterprises (including semi-autonomous divisions within larger organizations, such as IT). People, including Hansen, have made the analogy that many of the leading systems are like a Ferrari. One wouldn’t buy a Ferrari SF90 Spider to haul rocks or take the kids to school.  A more suitable vehicle might be a Ford F150 or a Hyundai Santa Cruz which is not only cheaper but may more appropriately serve the need of a family or small business.

Sometimes, it pays to start small and simple. This, in turn, provides a flexibility that is necessary to function as a business. Yet, the existing suite of procurement technology takes a one-size-fits-all approach. They are built for the large enterprise with plenty of large enterprise features and a large enterprise price tag. Many of them are older. They lack a contemporary user experience. They bolt on AI as an afterthought, not as a central part of the functionality.

There are so many players in the procurement technology space because there are so many different types of buyers.

In procurement technology, there need to be tools targeted for small to medium-businesses that seek to transition from running RFPs with emails and spreadsheets to running a lean operation leveraging the most appropriate AI-enabled capabilities.

EdgeworthBox is a flexible platform of tools, structured data, and community focused on executing RFPs. Our AI suite integrates and adapts to existing customer workflows, improving rapidly with usage by propagating best practices, replicating successful approaches, and significantly enhancing collaboration across business functions

We’d love to hear from you. Please reach out. And watch this space.

While this blog focuses primarily on topics related to Procurement & Contracts, I am taking the liberty of discussing some principles that apply to other areas as well.

I read the MIT article stating that over 95% of GenAI initiatives have failed with mixed emotions. Finally, a prestigious institution stated a fact known to those who of us who have worked in this area. Having driven significant digital transformations successfully, I can confidently assert that there really is no excuse for these failures. With the possible exception of integration, the primary technical & technological limitations – processing power, computational speed, storage, network connectivity and speed, analytical libraries – have been largely addressed. IMHO, there are two main reasons – other informed sources will give you between 5 and 7 – viz. data quality and user education/adoption. Address those early and the scales tilt dramatically in your favor.

With regard to GenAI, let us state some basic facts

• Agentic AI / GenAI work on relationships primarily within a textual content. Simply put, it identifies combinations of words to make sentences, paragraphs, posts & presentations. Thanks to the incredible underlying technologies, it builds layers upon layers of relationships and amazingly produces high quality content which appears to make sense. Note however that it is not trying to do a traditional optimization nor make a true business decision i.e. caveat lector applies to all recommendations.
• The content that GenAI generates is dependent upon the information that it is fed. As was seen with Grok, it generated some extremely antisemitic content since the corpus of information inadvertently included some very inappropriate content. On the flip side, the higher the quality of the corpus content, the better the recommendation.
• GenAI is not free. The more extensive the search, the more expensive it is. As information proliferates, the cost of tokenizing the content – a geeky way of saying searching for and incorporating content – will at least partially offset the efficiencies due to improvement in technologies.

Having said that, I am extremely optimistic of the value that can be realized through GenAI and Agentic AI. Both are extremely well suited for text heavy business functions such as Procurement & Contracts. Using a very rudimentary version of the AI agents (think primordial Agentic AI), my team was able to save over $1.5 Million per quarter and it took only 3 months to set up and to start generating the value. Just FYI, this number was validated by the CFO. I am certain that today’s initiatives will realize significantly larger benefits.

A couple of quick points to consider a possible approach for your GenAI / Agentic AI initiative:

• Focus on the problem not the technology – (This is surely a trope by now). Most initiatives focus solely on leveraging a single capability or technology. That is similar building a house with only vertical pillars. A holistic or complete solution may also incorporate ML/AI (the quantitative part of AI), visibility, optimization, etc.
• Address the aforementioned bottlenecks by:
  • Educating the end-users at the onset of the project … or earlier. Increasing the user involvement significantly improves user-adoption, a key factor for success.
  • Limit the data scope and focus on high quality data. As much as possible, focus on data relevant to your business objective. Adding additional data has diminishing returns and usually brings additional issues such as data quality.

While developing and deploying such solutions, I had some very pleasant surprises.

• Value realization is actually quite rapid. Bottom-line benefits show up in as soon a month. Set up KPIs to track the realized value.
• Data quality improves quickly. A virtuous cycle is created where data is used more when the data quality is high and the increased usage improves data quality.
• Business silos start to break and cross-functional collaboration increases significantly. A second virtuous cycle occurs when the high(er) quality data and information is used by other business functions which in turn drives improved analytics and data quality.
• The users directly improve the solution quality. An educated user has an intuitive idea of what “good” looks like and where the value lies. They take it upon themselves to suggest modifications and actively participate in issue resolutions.

Regardless of whether you are planning to start a GenAI / Agentic AI project or planning to pause one, I recommend an excellent (free) book about building AI agents by Sam Bhagwat. It gives you several ideas to incorporate into your own efforts. If you need any assistance, please do not hesitate to reach us – Naresh Rao or Chand Sooran. We would love to connect.

Siloed data means that teams draft and issue RFPs with a subset of the information they require to write a comprehensive document soliciting supplier proposals. The buyer’s team lacks a full sense of the problem the firm wants to solve with the procurement or its importance. They may not know the full spectrum of suppliers who can address their requirements.

Siloed people means that not every stakeholder who should be part of the procurement gets to join. This includes some of the end users or others who will be affected by the purchase, as well as people who have domain expertise regarding the space.

Siloed opportunities means that the RFP process limits the number of organizations collaborating on a problem. For example, if both marketing and finance need a similar software, they may end up running separate procurement events instead of a joint one. Companies or government agencies purchasing the same solution might benefit from issuing a single RFP but are prevented from doing so by policy restrictions or, more likely, an inability to discover like-minded partners.

Silos can be thought of as fractal; they look the same at different scales. Procurement silos can appear similar at the department level, at the firm level, and at the level of multiple companies. Divisions within a department fail to collaborate effectively, just as departments within a firm disappoint. There can be significant obstacles to joint procurement that spans multiple buying entities, e.g., cities in different states or provinces.

All of these things contribute to sub-optimal outcomes. What does that look like practically? An optimal procurement outcome is one in which the buying entity buys the right solution, from the right supplier, at the right price.

These silos emerge for many reasons including politics, organizational design, compliance policies, fear, or an inefficient approach to data. People use different language to describe the same problem, making it difficult to communicate what they want.

These silos emerge organically because they exist within the context of both internal markets for information and power, as well as external markets for goods and services.

Conceiving of these dynamics as market-based is the first step towards resolving the frictions that stand between the buyer and value-for money, between the supplier and a long-term valuable customer relationship.

MIT’s Andrew Lo has written extensively about what he calls the adaptive markets hypothesis:

“The adaptive market hypothesis, as proposed by Andrew Lo, is an attempt to reconcile economic theories based on the efficient market hypothesis (which implies that markets are efficient) with behavioral economics, by applying the principles of evolution to financial interactions: competition, adaptation, and natural selection. This view is part of a larger school of thought known as Evolutionary Economics.”

It is a radical departure from the prior way of thinking about markets as machines that process information instantaneously to reflect the correct, rational view in the price of a security.

Adaptive markets mean that markets are more like biological ecosystems that may or may not be efficient at any given point in time in the ways that they process information. Under some conditions, at some points in time, they can be very good at processing information and allocating resources; in other circumstances, they can be wildly off the mark.

Adaptive markets are made up of individuals and organizations that are themselves flawed and irrational. People are overconfident. People exhibit loss aversion. People can be lazy. People have a difficult time seeing things with a systemic perspective. People use heuristics and rules of thumb to proceed. The relative impact of different types of investor can change over time, shifting the market’s underlying structure. Strategies like value that worked twenty years ago stop working in a zero-interest rate environment disrupted by significant technological change in the economy. Ten years ago, individuals didn’t influence options markets; now they dominate them.

Things work until they don’t.

Lo’s thesis is a way to synthesize the original mechanistic models of financial markets with the subsequent rise in behavioral economics developed by researchers like Daniel Kahneman.

The efficient markets hypothesis cannot contemplate meme stocks or bubbles; adaptive markets can.

Markets exist within a broader framework in which everything is part of the complex adaptive system that is our social, corporate, and economic life.

To succeed in a biological environment, one needs flexibility; the conditions change constantly.

One needs to evolve.

This is true of procurement, too. The problems that firms try to fix with purchases are in flux. The people and suppliers who are involved in these decisions shift constantly. New technologies like AI emerge to change the landscape. Geopolitics interferes.

Buyers in markets for goods and services, just like investors in financial markets need a clear, complete picture of the chess board.

Silos are problematic in a stable environment. Silos are damaging in a dynamic environment. Silos are devastating in a disruptive environment.

If we accept the premise that a rules-based, mechanical approach is doomed to produce the sub-optimal procurement outcome, then what do we need to do for adaptive success?

• Collaboration and sharing of as much relevant data within the enterprise and across organizations as possible
• Increased participation to solicit maximum input to shape the discussion with suppliers, identifying possible solutions, and evaluating submitted proposals
• Joint RFPs within the firm and across organizations
• Standardized language that minimizes jargon to maximize the efficiency of communications

Which brings me to Figma.

Figma is the market leader in product design software. People use it to design and prototype software applications. They mockup so-called wireframes to show what the different sections of an application will look like and then they make prototypes to show the user flow within the application, usually before the developers write a single line of code. It’s not about making it look pretty (although that’s part of the outcome usually). It’s focused on simplifying the user experience and addressing edge cases in which users can arrive at dead ends when navigating the application. It is also about ensuring that the application includes all the necessary functionality, manifesting the vision of the software architect as closely as possible.

Before Figma, there was Sketch. Sketch appeared on the scene in 2010. It created the category, recognizing the explosion in app design as new ways of interacting with increasingly sophisticated software emerged. Before Sketch, designers would try to adapt existing tools such as Adobe Photoshop for the purpose, but this was difficult. Sketch was a desktop app built for the MacOS. It enabled a single designer to whip up complex wireframes quickly. It was distinguished by its functionality; it was built for this purpose.

Figma came later. It took the company years to write its code, but it disrupted the space. It had similar base functionality as Sketch, but it was built natively for the browser (not as an installed desktop application) and it added an important layer: collaboration. Here’s Stratechery’s Ben Thompson:

“Think about my brief description of this “product design and development” segment: multiple app views created by design and implemented by engineering imply at least two different people working on a project (a designer and a developer); in reality, the huge number of different views and increased functionality in apps meant that there were increasingly large teams on both sides. Sketch definitely made it easier to design an app in one place, but it did nothing to make it easier for teams to work on an app together; Figma, because it was native to the web, effectively got collaboration for “free” from the beginning.”

Figma took off. Thompson quotes Figma’s S-1 filing related to their recent blockbuster IPO:

“As more designers and their teams started using Figma, they began to understand the benefits of designing together in the browser. It was more fun working collaboratively in the same file; it was also faster and more efficient to work in a single product that brought storage, asset creation, prototyping, and other parts of the design toolchain into one place. The ability to easily share work with a URL led people to bring collaborators into their files earlier, placing more emphasis on co-creation and less on the “big reveal.” It also led Figma to spread quickly within companies and design communities globally, while giving teams something they’d never had before: a single source of truth to access the most up-to-date designs. Today, the openness and accessibility that Figma helped pioneer is no longer a novelty; it’s the expectation, a way of working that has spread across teams, tools, countries, and industries — and transformed the way products are designed and built.”

Figma was built for an adaptive market for information and influence within the organization (and across the organization if you include consultants and third parties).

Figma owns the market.

Sketch was an old-school approach, an application built for a different era which limited the number of stakeholders involved in the project. Figma recognized that their customers could build better apps (obtain better outcomes) with more collaboration and more flexibility. They made the user experience simple and accessible.

Figma also noted that it was going public, not because they perceived AI to be a threat that would put them out of business, but because they wanted to add AI as a complementary layer to their collaborative suite.

An adaptive markets approach to RFPs would do the same thing. It would explode the process in terms of enabling more data and more input from a wider array of people, supplemented with AI tools, wrapped in a simple, elegant user experience.

AI will not replace procurement; it will enhance it. It is a bicycle for the mind, in the logic of Steve Jobs.

Does this characterize the RFP tools in the market today? Were they built natively for collaboration? Are they easy to use? Do they bolt on AI as a replacement or is AI an adjunct function?

This is what we’ve built at EdgeworthBox. We’re a collaborative, adaptive suite of tools, data, and community that enables flexibility and joint procurement. Watch this space. Important new things are coming this Fall.

With the Request for Proposals process, the answer is likely no.

Consider the evolution of the RFP. You can imagine industrial companies in the 19^th century looking to purchase blocks of commodities like copper of a specific grade or wool for their mills. Commodities have a standard grade. They are fungible; one pound of prime beef is the same as another pound of prime beef. When we isolate characteristics related to quality, then the sole remaining factor is price. Buyers want to pay the lowest price. The supplier that is most motivated to sell will be most aggressive on price, perhaps reflecting an excess inventory that costs money to finance.

The RFP process, or more accurately, the Request for Quote process, is optimized for purchasing commodities where there is only one deciding factor.

There are several issues that derive from this, though.

One, we have trained buyers to focus on price as the dominant factor in selecting solutions. The problem here is that not everything is a commodity. When we need to distinguish between solutions across multiple dimensions, trying to reduce the problem to just one leads to sub-optimal outcomes. We may end up paying the lowest price today only to forego higher revenue or to incur higher costs in the future because we picked the wrong proposal.

Two, we have come to rely on the convenience of the RFP. Because it’s a process with which we’re familiar, we default to the RFP, ignoring the possibility of any other approach. We’ve baked it into our compliance policies. We won’t get fired for running an RFP.

Three, we presume to have enough category knowledge to be able to write a bid solicitation document that will generate plenty of responses. We assume that if we issue an RFP, suppliers will respond with plenty of free information either because they understand what we’re looking to buy or because they’ll do anything we ask in the hope of obtaining our business. The lazy default of the buyer is to be arrogant about their power relative to the supplier base.

The truth is that when it comes to complex procurement, we are not purchasing commodities. We need a process that is designed for the thing that we’re buying and we are blind to the possibility of alternatives to the RFP because of administrative inertia. We shouldn’t assume that we know more than the suppliers or that we are very good at communicating our intent. Writing is difficult. Most people struggle with it as individuals. Things can only get worse when we start crafting a bureaucratized instrument by committee.

Charlie Munger was an American lawyer and investor with a legendary track record. He was famous for his wisdom, expressed in clear language. These consisted principally of a set of mental models that enabled him to understand the world. Here’s Farnam Street discussing one of Munger’s favorite techniques: inversion.

‘It is not enough to think about difficult problems one way. You need to think about them forwards and backward. Inversion often forces you to uncover hidden beliefs about the problem you are trying to solve. “Indeed,” says Munger, “many problems can’t be solved forward.”

…

‘Despite our best intentions, thinking forward increases the odds that you’ll cause harm (iatrogenics). Thinking backward, call it subtractive avoidance or inversion, is less likely to cause harm.

‘Inverting the problem won’t always solve it, but it will help you avoid trouble. You can think of it as the avoiding stupidity filter. It’s not sexy but it’s a very easy way to improve.’

To apply this approach to the RFP, let’s start with the desired outcome and think about all the steps that it would take to get there, moving backwards in time.

When we purchase something significant or complex using a reverse auction like an RFP, we want to solve a problem. It’s more than that, though. We want to solve the problem as quickly and efficiently as possible while paying a reasonable price. We want to buy the right solution, from the right supplier, at the right price.

To solve the problem, first we need to understand the problem. It’s not enough to state it. We need to pull it apart. We need to assess how it interacts with other parts of the system of our enterprise. We need to think about the things that can go wrong. We need to understand the tradeoffs and conflicts in our existing approach, so that we can appraise how our solution will impact all aspects of the organism.

We also need to understand all the different options on the market and why suppliers made the choices they did in coming up with the variety of products we confront.

Moving backwards in time from our optimal outcome, the most immediate step is having a way to evaluate the options in front of us. Ideally, we have been able to convince a large number of suppliers to present us with alternatives. We have a representative sample that is indicative of the diversity of solutions from which we could choose. We don’t need every solution provider to offer us a sample solution. We just need to know that we have considered all the broad types of solution.

We need a way to compare these surfaced options that systematically helps us to pick the right one across multiple dimensions, not just price. To make an informed decision about how this will work as a system within the enterprise and the complexity of all its myriad moving parts, we need people who understand all those pieces and how they complete the puzzle to be part of the process.

Moving backwards another step, we need multiple suppliers to engage with us. It’s not sufficient to have a sophisticated evaluation process if we don’t hit the critical mass of proposals. We have to convince people to engage with us. This means we have to reduce their costs significantly. (It might even make sense to pay their proposal costs up to some reasonable limit.) But to really get suppliers to plug into our conversation, buyers need to showcase the problem in a way that appeals to their interest in the problem in the first place. We need to include them in the definition of the problem so that we can elicit from them their intelligence about the market. Ideally, the buyer enterprise doesn’t develop their requirements in a vacuum but relies upon the supplier knowledge to help them refine the specifications before suppliers begin to write their proposals.

Moving backwards through the decision tree, before looping in the suppliers, the buyers must have detailed conversations with all of the stakeholders within their enterprise, including staff who face the problem this procurement intends to address.

The one common denominator to all of this, and the thing that is underwhelming in most RFPs, is collaboration around various groups of people. There are fractal levels of groups starting with the prime contractor and its subcontractors (i.e., the supply chain). There is the internal committee of stakeholders who contribute to the process (and also those who will be affected by the final decision). There is the possibility of joint purchasing across organizations.

Collaboration is key. This is where the RFP process fails. This is the source of the iatrogenic effects of linear thinking and a forward progression through the problem that fails to also look backwards from the desired end. This is what nobody tells you.

The ideal solution will include these groups in direct collaboration from the beginning of the project to identify the full reach of the problem and to surface as many ideas as possible about how to solve it, in an inclusive manner that encourages feedback and engagement. This is not an adversarial competition in which buyer and supplier are arrayed on opposite sides of a zero-sum negotiation, but rather a collaboration to generate a long-lasting, transformation.

Incidentally, this lack of collaboration in the current status quo is a key reason for the failure of most digital transformation projects.

At EdgeworthBox, we have built a platform for collaboration that spans these different layers: the supply chain, the internal stakeholders, and partner organizations. We have built a platform that removes the frictions inhibiting genuine sharing of information. We enable inversion of the problem for complex procurements. If you’re a commodity buyer or someone purchasing small amounts, a traditional P2P system is what you want. But if you’re buying complex, long-lived, strategic solutions for critical problems, then you want EdgeworthBox as a layer in your procurement technology stack. Let’s talk.

EdgeworthBox, an innovative provider of procurement technology solutions, is proud to announce the launch of Generative-Procurement-as-a-Service. This suite of AI-powered services is designed to transform how organizations handle RFPs, supplier responses, and proposal evaluations, enhancing efficiency, collaboration, and decision-making.

“Our goal has always been to improve the coordination of procurement processes across different groups,” said Chand Sooran, Founder and CEO of EdgeworthBox. “With Generative-Procurement-as-a-Service, we’re bringing the power of Generative AI to procurement, enabling faster, more efficient, and more collaborative decision-making. By combining data, process expertise, and human judgment, EdgeworthBox augments leading-edge Generative AI tools. Offering this as a service enables both buyers and suppliers to streamline tasks typically performed by junior staff, accomplishing the legwork in a fraction of the time and freeing up senior staff resources. Technology alone isn’t enough. EdgeworthBox is built to help the people on the ground execute.”

The Generative-Procurement-as-a-Service offering includes:

• AI-Driven Statement of Work Generation: Enables organizations to draft a comprehensive first statement of work using public sector procurement data, significantly accelerating the RFP creation process.
• Supplier Response Accelerator: Assists suppliers in drafting responses to new RFPs based on their historical submissions, ensuring faster and more consistent responses.
• AI-Assisted Proposal Evaluation: Supports buyers in evaluating and ranking supplier proposals using a tailored “answer key,” enhancing both the speed and accuracy of the decision-making process.

This new offering is the latest step in EdgeworthBox’s mission to redefine procurement through technology and expertise, providing a smarter, data-driven approach to RFP management.

For more information about Generative-Procurement-as-a-Service, visit www.edgeworthbox.com or contact us at sales@edgeworthbox.com.

In this story, there are many different players.

First, there is the business. There are various trading desks focused on derivatives in different asset classes including asset-backed securitization, equity derivatives, mortgage-backed securities, corporate derivatives, and foreign exchange options. Each one of them is made up of hard chargers, individuals focused on performing at the highest level. They want to get paid; they want to get promoted. They do not have much patience for bureaucracy. It’s highly unlikely that one group works well with the other group, but they’re all important to the bank. Their work is very technology-dependent. Many of them have specialized expertise in technology. They are highly educated. It’s not uncommon to see PhDs on business cards.

Next, we have the technology group, all of which reports to the Chief Technology Officer. They are responsible for making sure that the line business gets what it needs and for ensuring that it stays up and running. This is not as simple as it sounds. It is a complex, interdependent system. They need to make sure that the various products they buy play well together. They’re responsible for guarding against cybersecurity threats. But they’re still at a bank and the traders rule the roost. If they worked at a pure play technology company, some of them might be senior power brokers within their organization, but here, they play a support role. It’s a vital position, but nevertheless, it’s secondary. The traders print the profits. Working in technology is a good job. They get to deal with leading-edge systems. It is challenging to make sure that everything fits together and keeps running. They’re constantly learning. But still. They’re not in the driver’s seat. And they’re very status conscious when it comes to anyone other than the line business.

There’s management. They hire the traders. They raise the capital and manage the bank’s compliance with various regulators. They keep the shareholders happy. Management needs to see over the horizon anticipating the kinds of business that might be exciting and relevant in the future. They must recruit the best and the brightest and keep them paid and fed, otherwise they’ll have staffing issues. It can be difficult managing the prima donnas. Heaven forfend they have employee turnover. The bank can have the best technology in the world, but if they don’t have the right people in the “front office” trading seats, it’s all for nought. And one reason traders leave for greener pastures is inadequate technology.

There are the risk management and control functions. These people enforce adherence to the rules so that the traders don’t blow the place up with bad trades, or worse. They measure risk, report it, and make recommendations as to how to optimize it. But it’s not just risk. There is financial reporting, too. There are controls in place to ensure that people cannot embezzle funds. Everyone remembers Dr. Copper from the mid-1990s, a trader at a Japanese bank who lost hundreds of millions of dollars by taking advantage of weak controls, poorly enforced.

There are other corporate functions such as legal to reinforce regulatory compliance. They manage the bank’s legal risk, whether it be its exposure to litigation with clients and other counterparties or its reputational risk from engaging in certain transactions. There is an investment bank with corporate clients, some of which are vendors to the bank as well.

And there is procurement. Whenever there is a large purchase, say for some new technology, the bank has a procurement department who ensures that there is a proper RFP, in addition to the rigorous testing the CTO must execute. It’s important to generate competition on price and solution so that they know and can prove to their stakeholders value-for-money.

Let’s add some more context here.

In the past, there have been problems coming out of the various trading desks when it comes to procurement. The first step is to generate a set of requirements. What is the problem that the trading desk seeks to solve? What must a solution be capable of doing?

Historically, the traders have tended to game the process in two possible ways.

First, in putting in a request for the funding to purchase a system, the traders have fudged the requirements. Instead of describing the problem they have and the things that any potential solution will have to do (or should be able to do), before putting pen to paper, the traders decided on the system they wanted to buy. Then, when they put together the requirements (and working with the salespeople from the company that makes the product they want to buy), they structure the requirements document to emphasize the things at which their desired solution is good and to ignore (or, at least) discount the things at which it is bad. They are so ham-fisted in their reverse engineering that the procurement people can see through it. Their description is so skewed that it limits the logical selection to just one vendor: their supplier of choice.

Second, since they are dealing with corporate money (and not funds that will affect their bonuses), they ask for more than what they need. So, in addition to distorting the description of their actual requirements, they embellish them so that they can purchase more bells and whistles for the vendor’s existing product or they can buy several additional products at the same time. If their real requirements were for a simple pen knife, they would ask for a Swiss Army Knife that had to be made in Switzerland and needed to have the Swiss cross with a red enamel handle. These traders get promoted and paid based on how well they do; they do not get paid based on the bank’s share price.

The procurement department is well aware of this problem. So they lobbied the Chief Financial Officer and the Chief Operating Officer to give them complete power over all procurements above some threshold of value, say $1m. The traders can make recommendations when it comes to the requirements, but the procurement department now sits in the driver’s seat. There is some input from the CTO’s office. Sometimes the procurement department listens to the business’ preferences, sometimes they don’t.

The business and the CTO group resent the procurement department. Who are they to tell them what to do?

In some cases, the investment banking department gets a whiff that one of their customers is trying to win a deal with the bank for their technology. The investment bankers will try to lobby on their behalf. Synergies.

Over time, the bank has evolved a cumbersome way of handling these projects to account for these behavioral distortions and cross-departmental lines. Practically, it means that a project that should take six months takes twelve to eighteen months to complete. It means that something that should have cost $100 comes with a total cost of $200. And because the process is so complicated and difficult and opaque, there are often legal challenges when a supplier who was convinced to invest in an expensive proposal loses, causing in turn further delays and further increases in costs. What’s worse, the timeline for implementing the solution in the business gets pushed out, so that the business’ ability to make money from a new revenue line or to lower costs is delayed.

Some of the other banks notice and begin to steal our bank’s clients. Our bank becomes less relevant in the marketplace.

How would we fix this setup?

One problem stands out straightaway. In the language of Silicon Valley, there needs to be “one throat to choke.” Ideally, there should be someone who works in the office of the Chief Financial Officer or the Chief Executive Officer who is in charge of overseeing the technology projects that exceed $1m in cost. This one person is responsible to the CEO for getting the best outcome, shortening the procurement cycle, and lowering both transaction and opportunity costs.

Given the fact that there are people from across the enterprise involved in the purchase, there needs to be a cross-departmental committee in place before the requirements are laid down. Instead of asking the bankers to form the requirements, these need to be developed by the entire committee, including people from technology, procurement, compliance, legal, and finance. This obviates the gamesmanship.

There needs to be a common technology system so that people using different systems and with little experience in procurement can access the procurement projects and do everything they need to do in one contained space. The procurement function for most of them will be an adjunct position, an additional duty to their primary roles within the firm. They don’t want to log into five or six different systems.

Just as there is one throat to choke, there needs to be one place to work on this project. The user experience of this platform needs to be intuitive and simple to use. Ideally, it will be plugged into the procurement system of record via application programming interface. In a sense, this platform is the layer that broadens the reach of the procurement system, exposing data and collaboration, all with an audit trail that tracks internal performance measures..

This platform will also be the place for vendors to interact with the buying committee, sharing information. The RFP takes place in this digital platform. All the communications are easily reported to authorities like the SEC. The simplicity and transparency is proof of fairness to the vendors, along with tools to help them reduce their costs.

Get this right and the bank shortens the procurement cycle, reduces the number of challenges, and attracts the level of competition on price and solution necessary to obtain real problem-solution fit at a reasonable price.

This is what we have built at EdgeworthBox, a dedicated, contained system for executing RFPs and coordinating large complex groups internally (and externally). Let’s talk.

As a member of the AWS Partner Network (APN), EdgeworthBox empowers customers to accelerate procurement cycles, increase supplier engagement, and cut transactions costs by optimizing the group buying process. Whether aligning an internal team of stakeholders, managing a network of contractors, or collaborating with other buyers, EdgeworthBox digitizes the most challenging aspects of procurement. Our platform provides a centralized, dedicated space for coordinating procurement efforts, ensuring problem-solution fit and maximizing value-for-money in the RFP process. EdgeworthBox can be used as a standalone solution or as an enhancement to existing procurement technologies.

“We are excited to expand our partnership with Amazon Web Services by joining the AWS Marketplace. This development streamlines the purchasing process for our customers, particularly public sector organizations, by making EdgeworthBox more accessible. Our platform is designed to help these organizations secure the right solutions from the right suppliers at the right price,” said Chand Sooran, Founder & CEO of EdgeworthBox.

To explore how EdgeworthBox can enhance your procurement processes, visit our listing on the AWS Marketplace or learn more at www.edgeworthbox.com.

EdgeworthBox.

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About EdgeworthBox: EdgeworthBox is a set of tools, structured data, community, and market intelligence that streamlines the way businesses purchase goods and services. It makes it easy to execute RFPs, RFQs, RFIs, or any other kind of reverse auction, while promoting collaboration, both internally and externally. Companies use EdgeworthBox to replace the chaos and complexity of email and spreadsheets to manage reverse auctions or to insert it as a complementary layer that improves an existing procurement technology installation. Additionally, different organizations use EdgeworthBox to issue and manage joint RFPs to obtain scale economics.

Contact: Sales Department, EdgeworthBox – sales@edgeworthbox.com

It creates a number of derivative issues:

• Poor specification of requirements: the organization fails to exploit its internal knowledge and connections
• Lengthy procurement cycles: decision makers struggle to obtain consensus
• Poor visibility into the value chain: without knowledge of or contact with contractors in the chain, managing risk in an opaque supply chain is difficult

When you put it all together with some of the other challenges imposed by the RFP process, the net result is the original sin of procurement: too little competition on price and solution, making it far less likely for the buying enterprise to find the right solution to their problem, offered by the right supplier, at the right price.

This ties into technology. Smaller organizations tend to use email and spreadsheets to manage reverse auctions (if they even execute them at all). Larger organizations are locked into a procurement system, often the sourcing module for the ERP system. In the former case, it can be a paralyzing blizzard of paper. In the latter, the use of the system is often restricted to the procurement department, given its complexity.

In either case, the organization fails to exploit its internal data and to promote collaboration across the various stakeholders involved in the RFP. When buying a good or a service to solve some problem, the entity usually convenes a committee made up of people from various functions: operations, finance, engineering, support, sales, the C-Suite, etc. None of these people are given access to the procurement technology.

How do we get the most out of our internal committee? How do we maximize their productivity?

There can be a jury rig solution for this. For collaboration, we could tack on a corporate messaging system. For data, it could be something as simple as a shared drive. When it comes to evaluation of the proposals, there may be a spreadsheet that goes around soliciting feedback on supplier proposals.

This setup is problematic for at least two reasons.

One, people are inundated with technology solutions already. Standalone messaging tools are like the dog collar of contemporary corporate life, reducing the individual’s control over their time and energy with its constant yank for attention. Email inboxes are polluted enough before adding additional traffic related to procurement projects.

People tell us they want a single contained, dedicated space for their procurement activities, especially when it is not their primary or even secondary function. They want a place where they can log in (when they want to work on the project), see all the relevant data, and be able to communicate with all the relevant people. They go in, do their work, and log out, resuming their primary job.

They want control over their time. They’re more productive and they’re happier when they get to dictate when and how they work on procurement projects.

Two, people want to have access to data and, if possible, tools that can help them make better decisions, faster. The jury- rigged approach where the procurement team act as gatekeepers for the sourcing system is insufficient.

At EdgeworthBox, we have built the dedicated, contained system for procurement. It’s a one-stop shop. People from outside the procurement organization can interact with one another, the procurement project, and the right tools to help them manage the project more efficiently. It takes less time. It makes people more productive. Our user experience is welcoming for everyone, including suppliers. Lowering the frictions suppliers face means more proposals, at least at the margin. More proposals means more competition. Procurement can use EdgeworthBox as the system for interacting with all the stakeholders, pouring the data that they need into the ERP system-of-record when necessary. EdgeworthBox sits as a procurement-enabling layer on top of the existing procurement infrastructure.

Let’s talk.