My name is Shae McEntire. I work for a sourcing software company called Talin.

Sourcing teams aren't short on strategy.

They're short on a place for the event.

Requirements get copied from the last RFP. Someone opens last year's Word doc, swaps the dates, and hopes the weights still make sense. Supplier replies land in six inboxes. One PDF. One spreadsheet. One "see attached." Scoring is a matrix someone rebuilds every time, usually the night before the award meeting.

That is not a people problem. It is a tooling problem.

How an event actually dies

Intake starts in email. A category owner sends a note. A buyer forwards last year's packet. Three people add a line. Nobody owns the final version, so the RFx that goes out is a mash of last time plus whatever made it into the thread.

Then the document work starts. Word. Old sections get pasted in. Evaluation criteria get reused even when the category changed. Supplier contacts live in a spreadsheet that is two owners out of date.

Replies come back however suppliers want to send them. PDF to one inbox. A spreadsheet to another. A "see attached" that is missing the pricing tab. Someone spends a day building a comparison matrix so the team can even see the same information on one page.

Scoring is last. Weights get argued in a meeting. Scores go into a sheet. One person holds the file. Leadership asks where the event stands and the honest answer is "in my inbox."

If that sounds familiar, it is because it is how most mid-market events still run. The strategy is fine. The event has nowhere to live.

Suites exist. They also take a year.

I talk to teams that run 10 to 25 events a year. They do not have a year for a suite.

They need four things in one place: the intake, the RFx, the replies, and the scores. AI can draft the slow parts. The buyer still awards.

That is the whole idea behind Talin. We run the event. You award.

We are Talin at talinsource.com. Not talin.ai (recruiting). Not a supplier-side bid tool.

One event we already wrote up

We ran this for a manufacturer that was still living in email. Three-person procurement team. About 15 to 20 events a year. Same facts as the write-up on the site. No new numbers.

Before Talin, a fleet services event took about five weeks. The RFP was built in Word. Nine suppliers replied in mixed formats. Scoring was a spreadsheet.

With Talin, that same event ran in about three days. The RFx was drafted and reviewed in minutes, not days. Replies came in through one portal. Scores were ready for the buyer to review.

They awarded.

If you want the write-up, it is here: https://talinsource.com/case-study

What I would do next

If your events still live in Word, email, and Excel, you do not need a nine-month project to stop that. You need one place for the event, and you need to keep the award.

If you want to walk a live category in 30 minutes, that is the demo.

Request a demo → https://talinsource.com/demo