COSMO (Centralized Online Sourcing Management for Organization) is a primary service of e-procurement. To buy more products for less money is a recipe for success.

Procurement has become an integral part of performance for the organization that spends heavily on logistics. COSMO helps you in the acquisition of goods at the best possible total cost of ownership, in the right quantity, at the right time, in the right place and from the right source for the direct benefit or use of corporations.

COSMO is a B2B application where we initiated a real time dynamic auction/tender between a single buyer and a group of pre-qualified suppliers. These suppliers in order to win the business try and compete against each other by submitting successive lower priced bids. These bids are entertained for a specified period of time and finally technically and commercially evaluated to award the contract.

Some of the features are:

For Organization

• Enhanced Process efficiency.
  
• Increased Transparency.
  
• Lower cost due to competitive process.
  
• Better decision making.
  
• Better monitoring of supplier performance.
  
• Identifying and rating suppliers who can match expectations on the price - quality - delivery equation.
  
• Access to a large number of vendors and Global sourcing at lower costs.
  
• Get 'market-change' benefits in shorter periods of time by allowing suppliers to define their store.
  
• Allow buyers to quickly and easily create Request for Quotation (RFQ). By simply selecting criteria and information from a list, they can develop these requests without having to spend hours on writing them up.

For Vendor

• Win new business without having to hunt it down
  
• Dynamic bidding process
  
• Faster procurement cycle.
  
• 24/7 availability of system.
  
• Lower cost of participation.
  
• Wider and equal opportunities.
  

Scope

COSMO plays an important role in helping you as an organization to reduce spending on procurement process. The scope of this product is to implement a computerised system that provides efficient and effective Auction/Tender Management of an organisation. The organization will be able to procure goods from the sources by featuring decreasing incremental bidding.

This will make it easier for businesses to start saving money and time on their procurement activities. This sharply contrasts the manual system where auction managers have to spend hours on writing RFQ(s) and deliver by mail causing wastage of money. The major benefit that comes with COSMO is the competition that it brings along with it due to which it brings in better competitive prices. It also brings in transparency, efficiency and cost reduction to the entire procurement procedure. Similarly the tenders so published are not being missed by any of the prospective bidders due to the distance being criteria for the same. Lastly it reduces hassles involved in communication and administration.

The proposed COSMO website is an interactive system with variety of features that allow the organisation enhancing comfort of participants. The high security mechanism of COSMO prevents unauthorized access to the system and encrypts the data to keep your data secure.

Additional Information

COSMO facilitates procuring goods/materials in the organization by Auction (Reverse auction), Tender or direct Purchase. The Negotiated Volume Discount which will be obtained due to consortium buying is an added advantage of using the system. COSMO has got enhanced Bid Evaluation and Contract Management Module that will ease your task.

Overall Description

There are basically three types of users who can access the system as:

Procurement Manager

• Procurement Manager can register sub office and vendors and assign them login.
  
• Provides basic system settings.
  
• Perform member management.
  
• View Purchase intends and call for consortium.
  
• Develop RFQ.
  
• Evaluate Bid.
  
• Manage contract.
  
• Generate Purchase Order.
  
• Rate Vendors.
  

Sub Offices

• Generate Purchase intend.
  
• Acknowledge receipt of goods.
  

Vendor

• View RFQ and participate by bidding.
  
• Accept Bid and Purchase Order
  
• Sign Contract.

Operating Environment

COSMO is a web based application developed using pure .net technology, based on the .net 2.0 frame works (Using VS .net 2005) with c# as programming language for development and SQL Server 2005 as the backend processor.