Our Mission Statement

At Southern Procurement, our mission is to empower school districts, cities, and county governments through innovative reverse auction solutions, ensuring transparency, maximum value, and fiscal responsibility in the procurement process.

Southern Procurement was founded in Mississippi, and we’re the oldest reverse auction company operating in Mississippi today, specializing in the facilitation of strategic sourcing and reverse auctions for the public and private sectors.

Our objective is to save the client time and money through the administration of the Electronic Sealed Bid (ESB) Reverse Auction Process.

Our process puts the control back in your hands.

Why Does My Vendor Hate Reverse Auctions?

So, this is the elephant in the room. I’m never surprised when someone tells me that a vendor doesn’t want the bid to go to a reverse auction. Ever. Reverse Auctions are extremely competitive and vendors aren’t able to control the information on the front end by writing the spec. Here’s what absolutely true, though: Regardless of who you want to win a bid event, you also really want more than one bidder. A vendor who knows that his customer can only have one bidder because he wrote the spec also knows that he can charge whatever he wants to charge for a service or product. He’ll sing you a song about “small margins”. Some will go so far as to say that reverse auctions aren’t fair. They’re absolutely fair. Give the customer the best price based on a specification that offers a level playing field for all bidders. Pretty simple.

Why is a reverse auction better than a standard paper bid? Well, for starters, the paper bidding process has been around literally since the building of the pyramids in Egypt…yes, as in 3,000 years ago. And it hasn’t changed much. It hasn’t changed because the technology that would facilitate this change didn’t exist up until the mid 1970’s when General Electric first started using them to great effect. In a Reverse Auction, vendors compete with one another in real time. They have more than one opportunity to win. When I was a contractor, I used to love to bid on Reverse Auctions. We won tons of them. That’s actually how I got my start in administering Reverse Auctions, seeing how effective they were in public procurement. Throughout the process of a Reverse Auction, a vendor often reduces his offered price for services and products multiple times, sometimes even by as much as 50%. Holmes County Schools found that out with their HVAC as a Service bid. They saved $5,000,000. You read that right. Five mil.

In order to protect his margin, a vendor will often try to convince you not to go to reverse auction by telling you things like, “We have to pay them 4%, so it’s going to cost you more.” While vendors may highlight our 4% fee, it's important to view this in the context of reality and simple math. A reverse auction facilitated by Southern Procurement typically results in a reduction of pricing by up to 20%. This significant reduction not only compensates for our fee but also offers substantial net savings to our clients. It's also worth noting that our fee is borne by the winning vendor, not the client. The reduced costs achieved through the auction process demonstrate the value and efficiency we bring to the procurement landscape. Rather than focusing on the 4%, we encourage stakeholders to consider the broader picture – where the tangible benefits of competitive pricing and transparent processes significantly outweigh the nominal fee, resulting in true cost-effectiveness.

You Said Something About Saving Me Time…

One of the reasons that our customers get tangled up with a vendor and end up paying too much for products and services is that most organizations don’t have the funds to pay the staff to write a technical specification for that product or service. This is where we come in. In fact, we handle every last bit of the paperwork for your bid event. For every bid, we will:

• Write the legal advertisement

• Working with your team, write a specification that gets you what you want and what you need

• Host all bid documents, addenda, and vendor responses

• Manage all vendor inquiries with you

• Administer your bid event, provide vendor responses and bid tabulations after the bid period

Overall, our customers report to us that they spend roughly 10% of the time they would normally spend on a bid when working with us versus administering a bid on their own.

OFFICE HOURS

Monday - Friday
8AM - 5PM

☎ CONTACT

vaughn@southernprocurement.com
(662) 275-4663