Procurement Admin
What is configurable, and what is not
The process is fixed — templates, criteria, categories and branding are not. Where the line runs.
- Duration: 20 min
- Level: Intermediate
- Read first: Set up the organisation
The most common expectation of a procurement platform is that it adapts to your process. With e-Request it is the other way round, deliberately.
Hard-wired
The process. Tender, internal approval, invitation, question round, offers, evaluation, award — in that order, every time.
This is not an open building site. It is the compliance benefit: a procedure that runs the same way every time can be followed two years later. A configurable process could not, because then every tender would have its own history.
If your organisation has a special process, that is a decision to take before rollout — not a setting to hunt for.
What you set yourself
- Categories, including their CPV mapping
- Evaluation criteria for offers and suppliers, with weighting
- Email templates — around thirty of them, in German and English, with preview and test send
- Branding — your appearance in the portal
- Roles and permissions, departments and permission levels
- Fields, as far as the product provides for them
None of this needs anyone from us.
The test send is the important small thing
Email templates are what your suppliers see first — often before they ever enter the platform. Use the preview and the test send before a template goes live. An invitation with a placeholder still in it is a first impression you cannot take back.
German and English are fully maintained. The interface exists in more languages; the templates in these two.
What does not exist
So that nobody goes looking:
- No tender templates. Instead you duplicate an existing tender — that is the answer to “do you have templates?”, and in practice the better one, because a copy starts from real content.
- No industry packages. The product is generic and is tailored to you through categories and criteria.
- No freely configurable approval stages. Internal approval exists, with documented rejection — it is one step, not a chain you assemble.
Plan limits
There is a page showing licence and limit values — users, suppliers. It displays; it does not enforce. Nobody is locked out for crossing a limit. Treat the numbers as information for your planning, not as a safeguard.