Broken procurement can kill relationships — and slow climate progress. The biggest problem we see with carbon credits RFPs isn't that they are inefficient. It's that most procurement processes treat suppliers like interchangeable vendors instead of innovation partners. What's not working: • Vague or broad requirements that force suppliers to guess what you want • Black-box rejections with zero feedback • Net60 payment terms that starve suppliers of working capital The result? Suppliers stop bidding. Buyers miss out on the right opportunities. Capital sits on the sidelines. How we’re striving to deliver a better experience for both buyers and suppliers at Patch: • Clear data requirements - suppliers know exactly what to submit, and we pre-populate repeat information to save them time • Transparent feedback loops - if a project isn’t selected, we do our best to get feedback from buyers and share it with suppliers, as well as proactively surface the trends we’re seeing to guide their strategy • Faster supplier payments - we bridge the gap with our balance sheet so suppliers get paid fast while buyers keep their preferred payment terms Climate solutions need velocity. When suppliers wait 60+ days for payment, that's 60+ days their solutions aren't scaling. When they spend time submitting to incredibly comprehensive RFPs and don’t get feedback, that’s time (and potential learnings) they can’t get back. Supplier-friendly procurement is how we unlock the speed and innovation this market desperately needs. Carbon credit sellers, what’s your experience responding to RFPs? What else could we do to make it easier for you?
Brennan - I would add another issue that we've seen when responding as a supplier to carbon credit RFPs. Some market intermediaries are putting out very detailed RFPs with very broad criteria when they should instead be using a two-step process with a request for expressions of interest (EOI) first, followed by an RFP for only the shortlisted projects. A shorter EOI process allows the screening process to happen without wasting a lot of time and effort for suppliers. There appear to be organizations out there that use RFPs to collect a lot of pricing and other project information (perhaps for the benefit of their market intelligence business units/consulting arms), when instead they could be much more targeted in their criteria. I should add that my experience as a supplier with Patch has been much more efficient with your team doing more work on evaluating our projects (and screening out ones that aren't a fit) and then asking questions to fill in any information gaps.
Thanks for sharing this Brennan. The biggest thing I would suggest is providing tangible feedback to respondents, so thank you for considering this! To do this, organizations running RFPs can consider: - How the RFP is structured in phases that are a light lift up front, and get progressively heavier. Milkywire has nailed this, and I'll shout it from the rooftops everytime I can. - Considering how the RFP structure - and how it runs on the backend, how its staffed, how submissions are reviewed, etc - will *enable* the organization to give feedback. If this isn't considered when building the RFP, then it will be harder to do after the fact and be far too much work for the small teams who run them. The key "Why" here, which I think is worth highlighting: this is all in an effort to scale CDR technologies and companies to the giga-tonne scale that we need globally. Without direct, specific feedback from those procuring CDR, suppliers can't course correct. The flipside? If we get clear feedback, we action it (I'll speak for Mast Reforestation here, at least, with our biomass burial project Mast Wood Preserve MT1). Anyone interested in discussing how to improve RFP processes can reach out to me directly anytime.
Account Director, Americas at Puro.earth
2moThese pain points strongly resonate with what I hear from my CDR suppliers Brennan Spellacy