Procurement Operations Reimagined

We built a business partner verification platform for a client to help companies navigate and win bids in the MENA region. The project delivered an intuitive solution that improves transparency and trust in the procurement process, providing businesses with a reliable way to find and verify partners.

The Company and Product

Our client built a solution that helps companies find reliable tendering partners, and enter and win more bids.

The founders have experience in taking part in tenders themselves and first-hand insights into why and how the procurement process could be improved. That’s why they decided to create a place where you could quickly verify your potential bidding partners' references, track record, and ratings. All of these would lead to businesses building more reliable relationships.

Initially, the founders wanted to explore and grow in the Middle Eastern market and then expand their reach as the solution is further developed. This is when they contacted the Monterail team with a concept for a collaborative bidding platform with extensive analytics features.

Scope and highlights

Web development

UX/UI design

Discover Workshop

weeks of design work

days of project scoping

team members

The Challenge

From the founders’ perspective, there were several challenges that they had to overcome with this solution:

Existing governmental applications were difficult to navigate without being familiar with the specifics of the procurement processes
Lack of risk management measures when it comes to finding trustworthy information and bidding partners - as a consequence, bidders had to rely on word of mouth
Most bids were won by large enterprise business due to the lack of transparency in the processes

There was also a gap between how the tendering companies presented themselves and the real value that they provided once the bid was won.

The founders’ professional background and their experience across different sectors, including wealth management, healthcare, investment, and banking, made them the ideal candidates to develop such a solution. In their initial plans, the platform could also serve as a matchmaking place between companies and experts.

Key challenges

Developing an application that seamlessly aligns with procurement process needs.

Elevating transparency in MENA region's procurement processes.

Supporting smaller companies as they try to enter and win bids.

Developing an application that seamlessly aligns with procurement process needs.

Elevating transparency in MENA region's procurement processes.

Supporting smaller companies as they try to enter and win bids.

The Process

The important element of the development process for this digital product was the two-day Discovery Workshop.

Why was the Discover Workshop crucial for this phase? Although clients usually have quite the holistic vision of the product already in place, they still need to outline all possible scenarios and make sure they didn’t miss anything. Additionally, the discovery phase lets us examine the business value and prioritize objectives.

Once the discovery stage was completed, the client’s team – with support from Monterail – moved to prototyping. Our UX/UI Designers focused on building easy-to-use designs and lo-fi mockups. Then we moved on to hi-fi prototypes, which are, more or less, interactive presentations of the product featuring both the UI and detailed UX. Simultaneously, the design team was working on the landing page for the product and branding. The design process lasted 10 weeks.

This is how we made it happen:

Discovery Workshops helped us reshape the initial concept.
Our team thoroughly analyzed the requirements and the wider, location-specific business environment for the product.
The final UX/UI designs were created in close collaboration with the client’s team and an external consultant.

The Outcome

The product has a simple and intuitive tendering process interface and the possibility to invite and recommend tender issuers and applicants.

The Minimum Viable Product version of the platform was developed following the prototyping process. After this phase was completed, the client then asked us to support the application maintenance process and further development beyond what was built for the MVP.

The success of this project hinged on the following factors:

Discovery stage and prototyping were treated by the client’s team as crucial steps of the product development process.
The founders’ professional experience and support from an external bidding expert.
Building UX/UI designs that were easy to understand and navigate.

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