Database software for managing pricing information / quotes

June 27, 2016 10:29 AM

I'm looking for database software for managing vendor quotes (for industrial equipment).

I work for a chemical engineering company that performs cost estimates for industrial equipment. The nature of the work is usually pretty speculative, and lots of projects tend to have unique considerations.

We have accumulated many quotes from vendors over the years for various types of equipment. To be honest, several vendors don't appreciate the constant requests for quotes for projects that are fairly speculative.

I thought it would be very useful to have a searchable database of these quotes to minimize the need to repeatedly contact vendors. Are there any programs that you have used that would be good for this? I haven't found anything that seems very useful. We could try to build our own tool using Microsoft Access (or Excel, bleh), but we're not experts at databases nor at creating user-friendly software. Can you recommend any solutions that you've worked with?

(There are solutions out there for databases of equipment prices such as Aspen Captial Cost Estimator, but I'm looking for a solution that can be used for our internal information, not just generic pricing.)

posted by beepbeepboopboop to Technology (3 answers total)

Mostly, "vendor management software" is the industry term, sort of like "customer relationship management" but in the other direction. Some of the options out there seem like they're very staffing-specific but others look like they're really built to receive and manage quotes like you're talking about. You might play around with searches to see more.

You are correct that you shouldn't need to build this from scratch. Your current CRM or ERP software may have a vendor/quote management module you can use, as well. (I work in the ERP space but nothing I've worked with is something I'd necessarily recommend for VMS unless you were already using the associated products.)
posted by Lyn Never at 11:05 AM on June 27, 2016

Another term that is used is Supplier Relation Management. Fully agree to investigate the options that your current ERP offers for registering quotes / RFQ's first.
posted by IAr at 2:26 PM on June 27, 2016

I am dealing with this and all I can find that really works is a simple excel sheet with tabs for each vendor with their part prices collated. You can do a macro table of contents and probably a macro for most common pages, oldest and newest information, etc. You can also develop databases for common quotes. If you plan to do tenders, you have to be prepared. I would suggest that while you do this process, you see if the company would sell price prepared plans to companies as a way to let pressure on estimating.
posted by parmanparman at 3:26 PM on June 27, 2016