Pantavanij: Hassle-Free Online Procurement and Auctioning Platform

Apisit Kuparatana, Managing Director

Devising an efficient procurement strategy has become equally essential as engineering unique products and offering attractive prices for enterprises. A large number of enterprises have been roping in experts to curb extravagant expenditure and help them tackle varying procurement regulations. Back in 2001, the internet boom created a sense of excitement among enterprises worldwide and ushered businesses to embrace the virtual world to reap rich dividends. The growing dependency on the internet worldwide was an opportunity many solution providers tapped on, but very few were successful. One among them is Pantavanij, a Thailand-based firm, which has made procurement and auctioning significantly hassle-free through its online platform. Within a span of a decade, the Thailand-based company gained the reputation of the nation’s largest eProcurement solution provider. Today, Pantavanij’s eProcurement solution is severing customers across Asia in countries such as India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Philippines, Turkey, and Cambodia. “We are one of the largest end-to-end procurement solution providers in the ASEAN region currently. We aim to deploy an enterprise-specific eProcurement solution that yields a higher return on investment at an economical price since many firms fret over the high expenses involved in implementing an effective fix,” mentions Apisit Kuparatana, managing director, Pantavanij.

Several recent accomplishments, about 100,000 users of a bank leveraging the company’s platform, a database comprising of more than 20,000 B2B suppliers and six billion purchasing volumes a year, bear testimony to Pantavanij’s outstanding success. “Pantavanij, Thailand’s largest complete eProcurement platform providers with $6 Billion purchasing volume per year, has aimed to help all ASEAN companies achieve effective cost reduction, business efficiency, and competitive capability with reasonable invested quality business applications,” mentions Apisit Kuparatana. Through Pantavanij’s eProcurement platform, OnePlanet along with four key elements—eAuction services with a qualified supplier network, experienced service team, and professional spend analysis and cost reduction consulting services—clients are provided with transparency, visibility, effectiveness, and control of their budget spending.

Transparency. Standardization. Collaboration

The Pantavanij eProcurement solution is holistic and enables users to conduct payment activities such as sourcing, bidding, purchasing, and submitting documents through a web-based application.

Our unique AI-powered platform will be released in a few months, and it will propel enterprises to great heights and tackle their procurement hurdles effortlessly

The company offers an electronic request form, which facilitates information exchange between buyers and potential suppliers to enable evaluation. Pantavanij’s eProcurement application, OnePlanet is designed to address different requirements and various procurement characteristic needs of all business sizes and industries. The application is available in two versions, enterprise and professional.

While, OnePlanet-Enterprise has been designed for large companies and corporate groups to digitize and embed each of their unique procurement process, standard, and tactic into their own tailored standard eProcurement application, OnePlanet-Professional can help mid-sized companies to build effective standard, control, visibility, and traceability on their spending budgets through a large verified supplier network. The current Pantavanij eProcurement and the eAuctioning solution is the result of 14 years of research and development efforts of highly qualified resources.

Further, Pantavanij is one of few companies that has been officially appointed to conduct eAuction services for nearly 70 percent of all government project bidding events. Pantavanij’s online auction can be categorized into three main types, so that a buyer can consider the best approach to fulfill his specific requirements and condition as follows: English Auction, Sealed Auction, and Multi-Variable Bidding (MVB) which can be further divided into Price Classification Auction, and Price Per Performance Auction (PPP). While for Price Classification Auction, suppliers must fill in “each required item” before submitting a bid and then the total price is automatically calculated and displayed on the screen, for PPP, suppliers must fill in both “price per unit” and “performance score,” given and rated by buyer, before submitting the bid for the PPP score to be automatically calculated and displayed on the screen. Apisit Kuparatana informs, “In 2017 Pantavanij conducted over 10,000 Online Auction events, with $85 Billion in volume. Although Pantavanij’s operation base is in Thailand, we are capable of conducting Online Auction Services for our clients in Indonesia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, New Zealand, and China.”

Optimizing Sourcing Capabilities

Apart from conducting Price per Performance auction, Pantavanij also provides eRFX or Electronic Request for (X) service delicately designed in order to improve sourcing and other similar activities significantly for the purpose of matching up a group of well-collective data with buyer’s criteria.

The more structured the information is, the easier it is to compare and evaluate suppliers with effective sourcing cycle times. eRFX is also connected to a large pool of 15,000 verified suppliers (31 Main Categories) in Pantavanij’s Supplier Network that can optimize sourcing capabilities which lead to a substantial saving. Apisit Kuparatana recalls examples of fruitful collaborations with a few reputed clients in the past to illustrate Pantavanij’s capabilities better. One such instance was that of a partnership with a leading food manufacturer that faced issues about varying procurement costs. The company spent an exorbitant amount to adhere to the procurement needs and experienced a lack of transparency in finance outflow. The adoption of the Pantavanij platform helped the firm to mitigate its procurement challenges efficiently.

Into the Future

Currently, Pantavanij has a cloud-based procurement platform that improves process efficiencies and helps customers achieve bottom-line savings by automating their entire sourcing and procurement activities as a source-to-pay (S2P) solution. Pantavanij’s source-to-pay software connects sourcing to purchasing, purchasing to invoicing and payment, and payment to spend analysis. It allows procurement organizations to streamline all upstream and downstream processes and cut down their source-to-settle cycle time with several values to users and company. As advances in software and AI vastly expand both the number of activities that can be automated and the degree of automation, Pantavanij is also leveraging technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, cognitive agents, and chatbots.

"We are one of the largest end-to-end procurement solution providers in the ASEAN region currently"

The futuristic approach of Pantavanij is also backed by the experience that Apisit Kuparatana brings in having played various kinds of sport in Pantavanij’s working culture. He mentions, “I believe that the AGILE working environment that I bring in promotes our people to be courageous and initiative persons. They dare to take risks—as long as we have valid plans and strategies—to learn more and gain value from the experience. Additionally, this will allow our company, our people, and our products and services to respond to any changes or dynamic situation.” The company is placing its best foot forward to adopt AI to enhance its platform and ensure it justifies a firm’s needs. “Our unique AI-powered platform will be released in a few months, and it will propel enterprises to great heights and tackle their procurement hurdles effortlessly. Team Pantavanij also plans to expand their cloud-based eProcurement platform across six nations by 2020,” mentions Apisit Kuparatana. Apart from enhancing its technological capabilities, Pantavanij is rapidly expanding across the ASEAN region and is looking forward to making its presence in nine other countries in the near future.

- Shiv Shanker
July 31, 2018