Managing tenders is an integral part of procurement for many companies. When your business needs to buy goods or services, you often want to invite multiple suppliers to submit their offers. Comparing these offers helps you find the best price, quality, and terms. Traditionally, this process can be manual, time-consuming, and challenging to track. But with Odoo Purchase Tender Management, everything becomes easier, faster, and fully digital.
In this guide, we'll walk through how the Odoo Purchase Tender Management app works, its key features, and how it helps businesses manage the entire vendor bidding process in one place.
What is Purchase Tender Management in Odoo?
Purchase Tender Management in Odoo is a tool that helps businesses handle competitive bidding from multiple vendors. It allows you to:
- Create and manage tenders for products or services.
- Invite suppliers to submit their bids.
- Compare offers from different vendors.
- Select the best quotation.
- Quickly generate purchase orders.
The entire workflow – from tender creation to vendor selection – happens inside Odoo. This makes the process transparent, fully trackable, and much faster than traditional manual methods.
Why Businesses Need Purchase Tender Management
Procurement teams often face challenges like:
- Handling multiple quotations from different suppliers.
- Losing track of communication and updates.
- Managing approvals before issuing purchase orders.
- Printing and sharing tender documents.
- Ensuring fairness and transparency in vendor selection.
Odoo solves these challenges by providing a centralized platform for tender management. It simplifies each step, reduces errors, and ensures that all stakeholders have visibility of the process.
Key Features of Purchase Tender Management in Odoo
Let's see the aspects that render this module strong and pragmatic for applications in real-life procurement:
1. Design and Maintain Multiple Tenders
Using Odoo, you can generate as many tenders as your company requires. Every tender can be associated with various products, suppliers, and needs. You can also organize tenders into types (such as goods, services, or repeat supply). This provides you with clean records of every procurement activity.
2. Add Products, Quantities, and Expected Prices
When preparing a tender, you can simply include the products you require, their quantities, and your anticipated price. This makes it easy for vendors to know what you need. It also provides a point of reference for comparing quotations from suppliers subsequently.
3. Send Invitations to Vendors by Email
No need to print or manually deliver tender documents. From Odoo, you can send tender invitations to multiple vendors directly by email. The system ensures all vendors receive the same information at the same time, which improves fairness and saves time.
4. Vendor Bidding and Digital Signatures via Portal
Suppliers can actually log in to the Odoo portal, submit their bids, and even electronically sign their offers. This saves paper and accelerates the process. Everything is online, so your purchasing team can see bids in an instant.
5. Manager Approval and Editing Quotation Lines
Before generating a purchase order, the managers can see all the offers. They can confirm, cancel, or alter quotation lines for validity. This brings an element of control and eliminates errors, such that only authentic and approved quotations are allowed to continue.
6. Create Purchase Orders out of Chosen RFQ Lines
After the winning tender has been chosen, Odoo enables you to create a purchase order (PO) right from the tender. You don't have to manually re-key data – data from the RFQ automatically flows into the PO. It minimizes errors and saves much time.
7. Vendor Communication via Portal Chatter
You can also communicate with vendors directly using the portal chat. They can inquire, clarify, or give updates. All communications are tracked within Odoo, making it simple to trace the history of conversations for each tender.
8. Print Tender and RFQ Reports in PDF
Odoo offers pre-print tender and RFQ reports in PDF format. You can utilize these for records, distribution to internal stakeholders, or presentation to management. The feature also promotes documentation that is professional and standardized.
9. Group and Filter Tenders in List and Kanban Views
The system allows you to view tenders in both kanban view and list view. Tenders may be grouped by vendor, type, or status, and you can filter with a quick search. This allows you to control a large number of tenders.
10. Role-Based Access Rights
Not all users require total control over tenders. With Odoo, you can define roles such as Tender Manager or Tender User. Managers retain complete control, but users might have limited views or can create tenders. Such role-based accessibility provides increased security and accountability.
How the Workflow Looks in Real Life
Here’s a simple step-by-step example of how a company might use Odoo Purchase Tender Management:
- Tender Creation – The procurement officer creates a new tender in Odoo and adds the required products and quantities.
- Inviting Vendors – Emails are sent to five pre-approved suppliers asking them to participate.
- Vendor Bidding – Each vendor logs into the portal and submits their quotation with digital signatures.
- Evaluation – The procurement manager reviews all quotations. They cancel one, edit another, and approve the top two.
- Purchase Order – The manager generates a purchase order directly from the selected RFQ line.
- Vendor Communication – Questions and clarifications are handled through portal chatter.
- Reports – A summary tender report is printed in PDF for management approval.
This process is simple, digital, and keeps everything in one place
Conclusion
Purchase Tender Management, available on the Odoo App Store by Devintellecs, gives businesses a complete solution for vendor bidding. From creating tenders and sending invitations to collecting bids, reviewing quotations, and generating purchase orders – everything is handled digitally. This app helps companies save time, improve accuracy, and ensure fairness and transparency. Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, it turns procurement into a modern, efficient, and fully trackable workflow.
