Initial Situation
A buyer in an industrial company needs to procure 500 pairs of safety gloves for production, a typical recurring need in the area of personal protective equipment and C-parts. Today, the process is fully manual. The buyer logs into four different vendor portals sequentially, searches for the requested article in each portal, and copies prices, units, and lead times into an Excel spreadsheet. Only then can a side-by-side comparison even begin.
This kind of manual price research consumes around 45 minutes per inquiry, even for straightforward items. With roughly 20 comparison requests per week, around 15 productive hours are lost on pure data collection alone. Errors creep in easily, vendor offers expire before they are properly evaluated, and the buyer has no consolidated view of historical prices, market trends, or volume discount potential. As a result, strategic procurement work like vendor development, framework agreements, and savings analysis takes a back seat.
Your Solution with simple system
simple system replaces the manual portal jumping with one unified marketplace that connects 850+ verified vendors. The buyer searches once and sees the full market response in seconds, fully integrated with approval workflows and ERP.
- Marketplace and product search: one search query covers all connected vendors and the open marketplace simultaneously.
- Automatic price comparison directly in the result list, with intelligent filters for vendor, category, and certification.
- Availability and delivery time are displayed transparently for every offer, so urgent production needs can be planned reliably.
- Direct ordering at the best price with one click, including automatic cost centre and G/L account assignment.
- Favourite lists for recurring needs, shareable across teams, plus RFQ powered by simpleAI for volume discounts and specification-heavy items.
Result
Price comparison drops from 45 minutes to roughly 2 minutes per inquiry. The best available offer is identified automatically, the order is placed in the same flow, and the buyer can finally focus on strategic vendor management instead of repetitive research.
Your Benefit
- Time savings: 43 minutes saved per inquiry × 20 inquiries per week = 14.3 hours per week or around 745 hours per year, freed up for strategic procurement work.
- Measurable EBIT impact: +€29,800 per year in personnel cost savings, plus an additional 5 to 8% material cost reduction through systematic price comparison and consolidated demand.
