The following tips are based on personal experience with Procurement issues:

1. Determine your procurement strategy. Your selected strategy will consider the product’s marketplace, your client’s requirements, the type of product, and your organization’s capabilities amongst other factors. Education, Experience, and ethical perspective in strategy selection is required.
2. Don’t assume that suppliers are lined up at the gate, ready to respond to your RFx. Do more to drive competition than just posting to common bidding sites. Advise potential suppliers of the posting and where to find it.
3. Don’t make a product delivery date mandatory, just don’t. By all means include delivery time in the evaluation matrix, but a mandatory delivery / completion date will likely deter competition and add cost. See tip #1.
4. Clarify the scope of work, remove ambiguity. State what you are looking for, the how to deliver is the proponent’s responsibility.
5. State your evaluation criteria and evaluate those criteria and nothing else.
6. Monitor the supplier’s performance. Every supplier should know what they have done right as well as wrong. Give the supplier the opportunity to correct deficiencies. If they don’t, they should know the consequences. Keep records and share your performance ratings with the applicable supplier. Do this and avoid the legal land mines in performance evaluation.
7. Respect your suppliers. A reputation for fair dealing will lower hidden costs and smooth bumps in the road to project completion.

There are many ways Procurement can add value to supply. These tips are the tip of the proverbial iceberg.