cosmoONE: Unlocking the Power of Online Auctions

Since its inception in 2001, cosmoONE has also performed 5,570 reverse auctions that correspond to more than one auction per working day and has achieved a total auctioned volume of €2.65 billion that represents an average budget of €475,000 per auction. Over the years, the team at cosmoONE has strived to bring about an average cost improvement per auction of 14.6 percent, which equals a €69,400 profit improvement per auction for the auction organiser. Moreover, the company realised participation of four bidders per auction with a 28 bids average per event, helping each bidder to improve his stand seven times per auction on average. “Our platform can enable submitting eight bids per second even when you have close to 200 participants,” extols Petmezas.

The prowess of cosmoONE’s platform was on full display when a large airline company used it to buy jet fuel. In this case, the ranking of the bidders was not just based on price, but also two additional factors: the payment terms and the amount of the letter of bank guarantee. These additional cost factors were translated into absolute cost and were taken into consideration along with the jet fuels price, online. As a result, at every single bid, when each participant was submitting all these three figures, the cosmoONE auction system online was calculating the overall bid cost and returned the bidders ranking. The airline company was able to improve the bids by changing any of the three factors and finally acquired the lowest total cost of fuel.

Underscoring the challenges faced by business today, Petmezas states that businesses struggle in improving the execution of any value of RFPs and tenders in a productive and efficient manner for both internal buyers and external suppliers. Besides, they find it difficult to maintain traceability, auditability, transparency and equal treatment in the supplier negotiations, as a corporate compliance mandate. cosmoONE addresses these shortcomings with applications, offered as a web service, to strengthen the effectiveness of the procurement executives with the right negotiation tools, aiming to decrease the purchase prices. These applications also enhance daily routine procurement operations by expanding the execution ability, thus lowering the admin costs. cosmoONE’s web-based applications further refine the procurement processes, decentralising the requested procurement actions and centralising the business controls. The web-based applications based on their ability to “talk together” and be available “on demand” can be classified into two broad categories: pre-contract (sourcing and auction solutions) and post-contract applications (e-catalogues orders and Dynamic Purchasing Systems). The B2B sector can benefit from this approach, as it is possible for businesses to pick only the service that addresses their specific need and use it for the period of time they wish.

The uniqueness of cosmoONE stems from its ability to “deliver” rather than selling promises. Besides, the company’s fees originate from their customer’s profits, which amount to a small proportion of the customer’s overall benefits. “We position our services not as a cost factor, but as a profit improvement factor,” says Petmezas. “We accumulate a variety of industry knowledge and return it as valuable advice and professional services to our customers, so time to value is another great advantage for them.”

As a part of OTE Group (Greek PTT) of companies and the Deutsche Telekom family, cosmoONE operates under all strict provisions for quality, security, risk assessment and compliance management, which serves as an assurance factor for its clients. Moving ahead, cosmoONE is currently developing a new generation of their auction solution with many technological improvements and marketing advantages, aiming to fully personalise the service. “We are also developing the next version of our tender platform which we believe will be a breakthrough in flexibility and customer experience,” concludes Petmezas.