End users often know what they need to buy, but don’t know how to buy it in a compliant way. End users may wait too long to engage procurement, but the later procurement is engaged, the more likely end users are to miss compliance considerations that delay the buying process.
How can procurement be seen as a valued partner that can expedite and enable departmental goals, versus slowing them down?
Now, you can empower your end users to search for contracts on Pavilion and forge a stronger working relationship to help them get what they need faster.
Why have end users search for contracts on Pavilion?
When end users search for contracts on Pavilion, you can:
- Help them get what they need faster. Leveraging a cooperative agreement not only saves your team time from investing in a new solicitation process, but also helps departments purchase what they need in days or weeks. Help your end users benefit from Pavilion’s expansive network of cooperative procurement contracts – the largest and fastest-growing in the country — to deliver impact, faster.
- Reduce back-and-forth. Allowing your end users to directly search for suppliers and scopes means you can spend less time defining “what” needs to be purchased, and jump to the “how” of procurement options that meet your end users’ needs.
- Build trust with end users. By enabling end users to directly search Pavilion – alongside guardrails that protect your agency’s compliance requirements – you can give end users a sense of control over the procurement process and increase productive collaboration between end users and your procurement team.
“Today, our purchasing team no longer spends hours wrangling manual data or going back and forth with end users to explain what is and is not possible. We’ve empowered our end users.”
- Anda Upchurch, Grand Prairie, Texas
How it works:
End users don’t understand the details of contracting. With Pavilion, they don’t have to. You can set guardrails around the kinds of contracts and contract sources you’d like your end users to have access to on Pavilion, so they’re only seeing results from pre-approved contract sources. Then, collaborate directly with end users through Projects where you can jointly save, view, and discuss relevant contracts and suppliers.
“Pavilion makes it a lot easier for me. And it really puts a lot of extra research in the hands of the person actually wanting to buy that item.”
- Christine Finney, Peoria, Arizona
- Define your contract parameters (sources, etc.) You can define account preferences to automatically filter out contracts that don’t meet your compliance requirements. Here is a sample of the search filters you can define. Don’t see filters you need? Contact our team to discuss your agency’s needs.
- Add a Pavilion search bar to your internal or external website. Add a Pavilion search bar to your website or intranet pages to make it easy for your end users to search Pavilion for cooperative contracts. If your organization’s contracts have been added to Pavilion, this can also help you avoid duplicative solicitation requests by making it easier for end users to find active contracts that may already meet their needs.
- Train your end-user team(s). Have Pavilion do a group walkthrough to help end users get started. We offer customizable trainings that cover everything end users need to successfully search for cooperative contracts, from the basics of cooperative procurement to account set-up and beyond.
Anda Upchurch from Grand Prairie, Texas: “We trained our end users on the basics of cooperative procurement and how to use Pavilion. Together with the Pavilion team, we designed and launched a series of webinars for our agency’s end users.”
- Search collaboratively. Invite end users to join you on Pavilion. Send any Pavilion contract directly to a teammate with a single click. Or, save the contract to a shared workspace where you and your end users can save multiple contracts, shortlist suppliers, and trade notes. Need to loop a new stakeholder? Invite them to your project so that they can quickly get up to speed.
- Stay on the same page as you contact suppliers. Find a contract that matches your needs? Contact suppliers directly from Pavilion to ask a question or request a quote. Use the “Cc” feature to automatically include relevant end users or teammates so everyone's in the know when the supplier responds with availability, pricing, and other information. We’ll start an email thread with them, and follow up if you don’t hear back within a few days, or help you navigate to the right supplier contact.
“We’ve been training our end users to know that they can find everything in one location. End users can just go to one site to search for contracts.”
- Kristy Garcia, City of Mesa, Arizona
