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Before, different suppliers offered different price bases - for example monthly traded vs. weekly or semi-monthly traded. They also offered different payment terms, such as prepayment vs. 15- or 30-days credit. It took quite a while for the responsible buyer to build an Excel spreadsheet that could create comparability between the offers.

Those days are gone: The new tender module does this easily by merely selecting a common price basis for all offers, including different credit terms. Afterwards, all incoming numbers are compared to that base price. Therefore, comparisons can be done in significantly less time than when using Excel.

I personally experienced this to be a great help throughout my recent tender for the Iberian Peninsula. Depending on the into plane pool the respective supplier is in, the event-based hook-up fee varies. Sometimes when differentials of suppliers close up sharply, the tiny difference between two different hook-up fees can lead to a competitive advantage of one supplier over the other.

The tender module easily calculates the total cost of operation based on the number of flights, and therefore the most economical solution can be selected at a glance.

During the different stages of my tender process, I felt more and more comfortable with the tender module and its features. After having negotiated all locations as often as necessary, I could incorporate the best bid (or what the buyer thinks the most advantageous bid is) automatically into the contract management part of Fuel Plus by pressing a button.

In addition, another time saver offered by the tender module is that all information migrates from the tender module to the contract module. This allowed me to save an enormous amount of time that I originally would have used for administrative work for the essential part of my job: Achieving the most competitive price available.