Context
Procurement tendering across MCN's offices was managed manually: briefs drafted in documents, suppliers contacted by email, and bids tracked across spreadsheets and inboxes. There was no single place to create a tender, invite suppliers, collect and review bids, or control who could see what and when. The result was a process that was slow, inconsistent between offices, and hard to audit.
The challenge
- Give traders a way to create tenders and customize templates for different departments and requirements.
- Let suppliers submit bids through a secure link without ever seeing another supplier's bid.
- Enforce the bidding rules in the system: approval before sending, bids hidden until release, and no access after submit or reject.
My role
I owned the product end to end, from the pre-development checklist and its user stories through delivery and launch. I captured the requirements and acceptance criteria for every role in the flow: traders who create and send tenders, approvers who review them, suppliers who bid through a tokenized link, and administrators who control privileges. I wrote the functional specification covering workflows, role permissions, and notification rules, then worked with the development team through sprint cycles to ship the portal to production.
Bidding fairness depends on visibility and access being controlled by the system, not by discipline. I specified that bids stay invisible until release, suppliers lose access after submitting or declining, and re-initiation never reveals a submitted bid to the trader. Those were hard requirements, not suggestions.
Approach
- Role-based design. Mapped every actor (Trader, Approver, Supplier, Admin) and defined what each could see and do at every stage of the bidding lifecycle.
- Reusable templates. Traders build tender masters and briefs from predefined templates and save their own customized versions for future biddings.
- Controlled visibility. Bids remain invisible until the end date, and only users with the release privilege can open them early.
- Secure supplier access. Suppliers receive a tokenized link, fill only their editable fields, add notes, and submit or decline, with access revoked afterward.