Achilles procurement toolkit
Support for sourcing and supplier management
www.achilles.com
Services for professional procurement.
Be better informed, make better decisions.
Reduce risk.
Reduce cost.
Procurement and purchasing support
As a purchasing professional you are faced with increasing challenges in your supplier sourcing,
management and procurement activities.
To manage supplier data, compliance and risk whilst adhering to your company’s procurement policies
you need a system designed around your day-to-day processes and activities.
Through systematic pre-qualification and powerful online tools Achilles supports your organisation by
reducing the cost, effort and risk of sourcing and managing suppliers.
Comprehensive supplier pre-qualification
Our solutions are used by around 800 of the world’s largest buying organisations to source and select suppliers that offer the products, services and standards they need.
The heart of our solution is a systematic supplier
pre-qualification programme with data capture through secure online questionnaires supported by rigorous validation through our assessment teams and qualified auditors.
We reflect your policies and standards in the supplier
pre-qualification process – driving consistency and compliance across your purchasing activities.
Our pre-qualification questionnaires (and audit programmes) are configured around the risk management requirements of your company, sector and region.
Typically they cover validation of the following supplier information:
Additional modules can be added to provide more detailed supplier pre-qualification across areas of specific interest to your organisation:
Specialist pre-qualification modules
Audits
Many buying organisations also include Achilles audits as part of their supplier pre-qualification process. The audit programmes align with the pre-qualification questionnaire information, giving enhanced on-site validation by Achilles qualified assessors.
Illustrative areas covered by Achilles audits
Achilles – part of your purchasing ecosystem
Once suppliers have satisfied your pre-qualification requirements we publish their data online and provide you with a range of tools, modules and functionality to work with our information.
Clients use our solutions to maintain accurate supplier data feeds into their ERP systems and to present key Achilles risk management information throughout the supplier life-cycle. To support this, we offer a number of options to pass data from Achilles to your ERP, spend analysis or contract management systems.
Risk management information for stakeholders
In addition to procurement teams other organisational stakeholders can access Achilles data online:
General company data
Products & Services
Finance Insurance & Legal Environment Quality Sustainability /
CSR
Health & Safety
Financial Analysis Sustainability / CSR Carbon Reduction Supply Chain Mapping
Health & Safety teams Environmental teams Finance teams Sustainability and CSR teams Ethics and Compliance teams Contract management teams
Quality Health Safety
Supplier sourcing and selection tools
Our secure, cloud-based platform allows you to search for products and services and view validated
compliance and risk assessment information on the associated suppliers. A range of standard and optional
tools are available to help you work with our data in your supplier management and sourcing activities.
Search, filter, compare and report
You can search for suppliers by name or by the type of product and service you require.
A range of filter criteria can be used to target your search or to refine results to those suppliers who meet your specific needs:
You can save search criteria to re-use on regular sourcing events and use your search results to run additional qualification and RFI activities from the Achilles platform.
A comparison tool lets you assess selected suppliers against key criteria to prioritise, short-list and export to other formats.
Our system saves and records results to provide an auditable trail for evidence of policy and process compliance.
You can configure your own reports by selecting the criteria and parameters you require from our extensive data sets. Once a report is run you can share this with your colleagues through the Achilles platform or export for use in other systems.
Track specific products, services and suppliers
Our Buyer Alerts capability lets you track data updates and status changes for any suppliers or product codes you select. This can support specific sourcing events or scenarios where you have responsibility for managing a roster of vendors or group of products.
Scoring supplier profiles and attributes
Our model uses algorithms to objectively score suppliers against selected criteria and data held on our platform. The scoring model is configurable and weighting can be applied to reflect criteria of the greatest importance to your business. The scores for each supplier can appear in your search results and be used to prioritise, pre-qualify, compare and benchmark suppliers.
Products / Services
Region of supply
Quality Health & Safety Environment Audit &
assessment
Compliance status
Your internal standards
Add your own qualification criteria and policies
To supplement our core Achilles pre-qualification data the Internal Qualification (IQ) module allows you to record, assess and score individual suppliers against your own criteria and share this across your organisation.
You can add documents, data and comments from multiple sources (including Achilles) and apply a qualification score or status to suppliers.
Your IQ scores / rules can be displayed in search results and if required you can restrict or filter searches to only display suppliers that have satisfied your IQ standards.
Assess suppliers for specific contract opportunities
Our Request For Information (RFI) module is an online RFI tool for assessing supplier capability to provide specific products or services.
Following creation of a supplier short-list using our search/filter tools you can develop a number of further contract-specific qualification questions to ask suppliers prior to inviting them to tender. This process allows you to further reduce the number of potential suppliers to a manageable number and to ensure that the correct suppliers are being invited to the tendering event.
You define questions and response types, targeted suppliers and closing dates.
The module tracks, scores and compares responses and allows you to qualify or non-qualify suppliers in single or multi-round events.
RFI stores the details, questions and responses from each event for re-use, reference or as an auditable record.
Secure Communication Centre
An optional feature provides secure, private online communication between buyers and suppliers. This provides an effective record-keeping solution to demonstrate compliance with regulation or company policies.
Alerts Instant notification of changes to products or suppliers you are “tracking.” Record actions and communications An auditable record of RFIs and communications
provides evidence of compliance with legislation or internal policies. Score suppliers
Sort, filter and prioritise suppliers with a scoring model
based on their data and questionnaire responses. KPIs A dashboard of indicators and metrics delivers key information on log-in. Save searches & results
Save search criteria for regular sourcing events.
Save results as an auditable record for
policy or legislation adherence.
Advanced search engine
Find products, services and suppliers
who meet the criteria you specify.
Additional modules
Your menu displays the modules and
functionality you can access.
Compare suppliers
Filter, compare and prioritise on key criteria
for short-listing and export to other formats. Internal Qualification A private, buyer-specific record of internal documents, audits, scores or comments about suppliers. Third-party data Access to specialist data from
trusted third-party feeds.
Audit
View supplier audit status if these form part
of your pre-qualification model. New and existing suppliers All suppliers go through the pre-qualification and
validation
process. Track
suppliers
“Follow” chosen suppliers and get alerts on changes to their data or status. Questionnaire status We provide a visual warning if data is incomplete or expired.
Power to procurement teams
Our secure online platform gives buyers “anytime – anywhere” access to source products and services,
view validated supplier data and check supplier compliance through a range of powerful, easy-to-use tools.
We have designed these around your key tasks to help drive performance and save time in day-to-day
procurement and supplier sourcing activities.
You can configure your language, content layout, display preferences and report formats to reflect the regular tasks you perform.
Unlimited user licences means buyers in multiple locations can access the platform to drive process consistency across your procurement function.
Review and improve supplier performance
In addition to our suite of tools to support supplier pre-qualification and risk management at the sourcing
stage we also provide solutions for managing existing contracts and vendor relationships.
Our Performance Feedback module provides an online framework and process to help you review, rate and develop existing supplier performance:
• Supplier continuous improvement programmes • Supplier issue resolution
• Future contract planning and consideration
We provide an established set of criteria to assess and score a supplier’s performance against. The module produces a detailed report that’s specific to you and a high level score on the supplier that can be shared across our platform.
As an Achilles community member you will also be able to review potential suppliers based on the performance scores they receive from other buyers.
1 Source: 2012 Customer Interviews
FTEs engaged in validation
In-house Using Achilles
Reduced effort in supplier data validation1 6 1 83% 6 4 2 0 UK Electricity Company
Reduce risk. Reduce cost. Raise performance.
We reduce cost and effort, allowing purchasing teams to focus on other high value and strategic purchasing activities.
“We use Achilles to reduce the time it takes
to pre-qualify suppliers. In Achilles we can
select a category and any vendor found is
pre-qualified. It makes the process very quick.”
Buyer
UK Utilities
“My use of Achilles was not due to a cost
factor, it was to reduce the procurement
risk; I wanted a qualified supplier. Safety
concern was the number one factor.”
IT Procurement Manager
Transport
“Achilles helps us comply with our
legislative requirements - this is one of
our key needs from their service.”
Buyer
UK Utilities
FTEs engaged in validation
In-house Using Achilles
Reduced effort in supplier data validation1
5 1 80% 6 4 2 0 UK Utilities Company
